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THE MODERN LIBRARY 


OF THE WORLD’S BEST BOOKS 


Pi we Or WHIESTLER 


ri 
. 


describing ih detail each volume in the 
Q£very reader of books will, find titles he h a 


ie BY 4 
iL ADpE LH: ROBINS PENNELL |] 
WITH fe 


Tose Pa PENNELL, at 
PAUTHOR OF ‘LIFE OF WHISTLER’’?’ AND (IE 


THE ““WHISTLER JOURNAL’’ 


WITH THIRTY-TWO REPRODUCTIONS 
IN THE AQUATONE PROCESS 


WM 
LOPE Ry, 


“Verne 


THE MODERN LIBRARY 
PUBLISHERS : NEW YORK 


Edward Stern @ C ‘iat 


Bett 00 Bound for THE MODERN Bee : . 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I. 


WHISTLER THE MAN: His GayETY 
WHISTLER THE MAN: His BITTERNESS 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: His SERIOUSNESS 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: His PAINTINGS 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: His Prints 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: His WRITING 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: His WIrT 


WHISTLER THE MAN AND THE ArTIST: His 
nr REPT e ee ee 


112 
134 
160 


184 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAINTINGS 
Portrait of Whistler in The Big Hat (His earliest 
painting of himself) 
At the Piano 
The Coast of Bare Aiche with the Tide 
The Music Room—Harmony in Green and Rose 
The White Girl—Symphony in White, No. 1 
The Balcony—Harmony in Flesh Color and Green 


The Little White ad in White, 
No. 2 . 


Thomas FS einent in Gray and 
Black, No. 2 . 


Cicely Henrietta, Miss Alexander—Harmony in 
Gray and Green 


Valparaiso Bay—Nocturne in Blue and Gold 
Old Battersea Bridge—Nocturne in Blue and Gold 
The Falling Rocket—Nocturne in Black and Gold 


Miss Rosa Corder—Arrangement in Black and 
Brown ) 


The Yellow Buskin—Arrangement in Black 
(Lady Archibald Campbell) 


vii 


77 


83 


Vili ILLUSTRATIONS | 


Pablo Sarasate—Arrangement in Black . . . 89 
The Master Smith of Lyme Regis . . . . 9§ 
Portrait of His Mother—Arrangement in Gray and 
Black ..0 0.) Sp 
Little Rose of Lyme Regis . . . . . . 4107 
ETCHINGS 
Portrait of Whistler (etching by himself) . . 113 
The Kitchen :... 0, 0 
Annie Haden in The Big Hat ee 2 a 
Black Lion Wharf). 2) (7498 es ee 
Weary MPEP Sil Ct 
The Traghetto » 0)" 227g ee 
Adam and Eve—Old Chelsea ae Me handy as 
Fanny Leyland |.) 3... Wie 
LITHOGRAPHS 
Firelight—Joseph Pennell, No. 1  . . . . 4161 
Nocturne (Lithotint) ee i 
The Smith, Passage du Dragon . . . . . 173 
St. Anne’s, Soho... 4): 4 Eo 
WaTER-COLORS 
The Convalescent . .<: i. \)) 52 


The Beach .... 5) 


INTRODUCTION 


JoserH PENNELL and I were to have written 
this book together. We had planned it, but when 
_ Death claimed him the work had gone scarcely 
_ further than the plan. He did not live to fill it with 
_ the life and energy he gave to everything he did, 
4g with the vigorous eloquence that came of his love 
_ for the truth and his strong convictions. However, 
_ I know what his ideas for the book were and, also, 
as his collaborator in The Life of Whistler, I share 
_ his unfailing sense of responsibility in all that con- 
cerns the great artist he honored as master and who 
honored us by appointing us his biographers. He 
= wished to show Whistler as he was, not as his con- 
_ temporaries imagined him to be, not as posterity 
_ might believe him to have been had he survived 
_ solely in the legends that grew up about his person- 
ality and his art. From the time we undertook the 
_ biography we spared no trouble to obtain the facts 
and expose the legends. Joseph Pennell’s interest 
never weakened and I hope mine may not now I 
m left to finish my task unaided. 


ee s and gone with incredible rapid 


Saat bea b J 
ie ee 


ity in that short 


period. Numerous “Isms” have been developed, 
have flourished, and have perished. To the expo- 
nents of the new creeds Whistler seemed a back a0 
_ number, and they endeavored to destroy his repu- _ 


tation by faint praise, dismissing him as insignifi- 


cant both in his achievement and his influence. At : 


the best, they declared, his sphere was limited. His 
painting had charm perhaps, but it was of the 
slightest. His etching was mere reporting. He 
worked only in two dimensions. And nowhere on 
Canvas or paper, on stone or copper, did he reveal 
that struggle for self-expression which, to be in the 
mode, one must now esteem as greater than actual 
accomplishment. But the Prophets of “Modernism” 
_ have already had their day and others arise in their 
place to herald the next phase in the progress of art. 

Art, however, has nothing to do with fashion, 
nothing with progress. It happens as Whistler said, 


and in its happening is perfect. Already the pendu- 


lum of popular opinion, that was threatening to 


swing far from Whistler, is swinging rapidly back 


to him. Nor is this surprising. The popular gods 
of the critics rise and fall with the passing genera- 
tions. In my young days, when Whistler hailed 
‘The Master of Madrid,” when R. A. M. Stevenson 


wrote his memorable book about Velasquez, there 


was dismay among the Ruskinites. To-day I hear 
that Rubens is fast supplanting Velasquez in c 


aay 2, 


oats Lae Bi hoe Ss has Oren 


| rain critical camps, shila one critic, a German, has 
suddenly discovered El Greco—whom artists have 
long known and appreciated—and to accept a new 
master is for this Columbus to knock down the old. 
; Velasquez is relegated to his proper rank as a pho- 
_tographer in paint, or as first bored celebrant of 
boredom, if you accept Yeats as an authority. But, 
with the next turn of the wheel, Rubens and El 
Greco will be the fallen idols. The more criticism 
: changes, the more it is the same, and as it was yes- 
‘ terday, as it is to-day, so it will be to-morrow. The 
critics will continue to imagine vain things and 
make strange discoveries, but the great artists of 
all time will survive praise and blame alike, and 
! among these great artists Whistler will hold a high 
piace. 
This place was accorded to him grudgingly dur- 
ing his lifetime, that is, by the many. The few, of 
course, understood. The many could not offer as 
excuse for their blindness Whistler’s habit of keep- 
bi ing himself out of their sight, for he always kept 
4 himself in it. He never shared the fancy of his con- 
“temporary Matthys Maris for strict seclusion in the 
_forgocten room of some mean London street. He 
_ preferred to pene his battles in public, to challenge 
DM the enemies” to open combat. He needed no dealer 
to force him to exhibit. His was the “joyous” task 
of bidding the unbelievers come and look at the 
7 des that bewildered and shocked them. In the 


ane Ge the ‘cerita since pie dank little ha: An 
been added, except in details, to the knowledge of — 


the man and the artist for those who already knew 


and understood. No unknown masterpiece has come ay 
to light, though fakes have not been spared us. 
Unpublished and hitherto unquoted letters have 


figured in the sale rooms but they have only con- 
firmed his reputation as a wit and a warrior in the 


defense of art, have only shown him again in the 


splendid gayety of his intervals of leisure, the un- 
failing seriousness of his hours of work. His pro- 


fession of faith as artist was made before his death 


in The Gentle Art, his “Bible” and, of the innu- 


merable books on art, one of the exceptions that _ 


live and will live. He did not leave it to posterity 


to explain him and interpret his art. He explained’ 


himself, he was his art’s own interpreter. He was 
proof against the laughter that greeted explanation 
and interpretation both. With his clear: vision he 
foresaw the day when the public that ridiculed 
him would itself be held up to ridicule. 

And he was right. If the knowledge of the man 
and the artist has been increased and strengthened 
only in details, the years have made this all-impor- 


_ tant difference. The ridicule is a thing of the past. 


He is no longer the charlatan of a day, but one of 
“the saving remnant” in art who remain, whose in- 
fluence must be reckoned with. He towers above 


his contemporaries, he cannot be altogether agnared om 


eee crt 
y those historians of art who are least in sympathy 
with him, his end has not been the rubbish heap of 
_ forgotten reputations and exploded genius. The 
_ critics who treated him as a butt for laughter and 
- mirth would not be as much as remembered had 
he not set them on a high pillory for the derision 
of the ages. Even Ruskin has ceased to exist as critic, 
surviving as the master of words, “whose writing 
is art,” to whom Whistler—the ‘‘coxcomb’—had 
_ the nobility to pay this tribute. Whistler’s fellow 
artists who would have none of him, who jeered 
_ with the jeering crowd, have disappeared, are al- 
most unheard of. Who thinks now of Tadema, 
- Leighton, Poynter, Richmond, of any of the Aca- 
_ demic heroes of his day? It is the Idle Apprentice 
_ whose memory endures, the bankrupt chased from 
_ the modest White House close to the river he loved, 
_ while they flourished in their St. John’s Wood and 
Kensington palaces. The present Bolshevism of the 
_ studios cannot destroy him. He will outlive the 
_ Bolshevists whose power is undermined by their 
_ own defiance of tradition. Whistler believed in him- 
_ self, yes. But still stronger was his belief in art, its 
_ history already complete in the accomplishment of 
: the past, though the chosen “with the mark of the 
_ Gods upon him” may never again appear. He was 
: thought a rebel, a Bolshevist, before the name was 
invented. But his rebellion was against the com- 
‘monplaces, the conventions, the hypocrisies of the 


xiV INTRODUCTION 


studios, against the use, the abuse of art as a moral 
or a social or an educational prop for the mistaken 
missionary. Art meant nothing more nor less to 
him than the “Science of Beauty,” and he held that 
it is for each artist, as generation succeeds genera- 
tion, to equip himself technically, the humble stu- 
dent of this Beauty, and carry on the tradition of 
the great past. 


ELIZABETH RoBINs PENNELL 
New Yorx City—1927 


BIOGRAPHICAL TABLE OF DATES 


1834 July 10th. Whistler born at Lowell, Massachu- 
setts. : 

1837. The Whistler family moved to Stonington, 
Connecticut. 

1840 Major Whistler appointed Chief Engineer of the 
Western Railroad and the family moved to 
Springfield, Massachusetts. 

1842 Major Whistler, invited by Nicholas I to build 
the railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 
started for Russia. 

1843 Whistler, with his mother and brothers, joined 
Major Whistler in St. Petersburg. 

1845 Whistler began his study of Art in the Imperial 
Academy of Fine Arts. 

1849 Major Whistler died on April 9th and Whistler 
returned with his family to Stonington, moved 
to Pomfret and was sent to the Rev. Dr. Roswell 
Park’s School. 

1851 July 1st. Whistler entered the United States 
Military Academy, West Point, Colonel Robert 
E. Lee the Commandant. 

1854 June 16th. Whistler discharged from the U. S. 
Army for deficiency in chemistry. 

1854 November 7th. Whistler appointed to the Draw- 


XV 


ing Division of the United States Coast and 
Geodetic Survey. Nera St eh 
Whistler resigned from the U. $. Coast and 
Geodetic Survey and went to Paris to study art. 
At the Piano, turned down at the Salon, was, 
with the other rejected pictures of the year, 
shown in Bonvin’s studio where Whistler first 
met Courbet. T'he French set: Twelve Etching 
from Nature published in London. 
Whistler began to make London his headquar- 
ters, and exhibited for the first time in the Royal 
Academy; At the Piano and five etchings hung. 
The White Girl rejected at the Royal Academy, 
shown in the Berners Street Gallery, its criticism 
bringing from Whistler the first of his letters 
to the press. 
Whistler established in a house of his own, No. 7 
Lindsey Row, now 101 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. — 
The famous Hommage 4 Delacroix by Fantin © 
Latour, Whistler prominent in the group, ex- 
hibited at the Salon. 
The Little White Girl in the Royal Academy, 
verses from Swinburne’s Before the Mirror, in- 
spired by it, printed on the gold paper of the 
frame. 
The year of Whistler’s unaccountable journey to 
Valparaiso. On his return he moved into No. P 
Lindsey Row. 
His first exhibition (at the French Gallery) of a 
Nocturne, one of the two Valparaiso Harbors: if 
Crépuscule in Flesh Color and Green. Represented _ 


Barversal: Exposition in Paris. His Twa } 
Lele: White Girls in the Royal Academy, 


damned by P. G. Hamerton, the abuse a chal- 
lenge for the “joyous” answer preserved in The 


Gentle Art. 


The Thames Set of Bee ne Sicdhern Etchings 
of Scenes on the Thames—published by Ellis and 
Green. 

Whistler’s portrait of his Mother exhibited in 
the Royal Academy, the last painting by him 
ever hung on its walls. 

Whistler opened his first “‘one-man” Exhibition 


at No. 48 Pall Mall, including in it the great 


full length portraits of the period and some of 
the Nocturnes. Percy Thomas issued the first 
Catalogue of Whistler’s etchings. 

Whistler began the decoration of The Peacock 
Room. 

Whistler finished the decoration of The Peacock 
Room, quarreled with Leyland, the quarrel the 
cause eventually of his bankruptcy. The year of 
the first Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition, Whistler 
showing among other things The Falling Rocket, 
the cause of Ruskin’s attack in Fors Clavigera. 
Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. 

In October, Whistler moved into the White 


~ House. In November the Whistler-Ruskin case 


was tried in the Exchequer Division at West- 
minster. In December Chatto & Windus pub- 
lished Whistler v. Ruskin—Art and Art Critics, 
the first of his pamphlets in brown paper covers. 


Fs 
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AS 

gt 

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Saat 
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ie 


1881 


1883 
1884 


1885 


ots ies Whistler eee pee he White 
House sold, and Whistler started for Venice. * | 
In November, Whistler returned from Venice to 
London, held an exhibition of his Venice etch- 
ings at the Fine Art Society’s, the first of his 
much talked about Bond Street “one-man” Ex- 
hibitions, the Catalogue of each issued in brown 
paper covers, 


Mrs. Whistler, his mother, died at Hastings. 
Whistler took a studio at No. 13 Tite Street. The 
year of the Duveneck misunderstanding in the 
Painter-Etchers’ Society, and the publication of 
Whistler’s Piker Papers—The portrait of his 
Mother exhibited at The Pennsylvania Academy > 
of the Fine Arts, and Philadelphia lost the chance 
of acquiring it at the price of a thousand dollars, 
as New York did the following year. 


The “Mother” in the Salon. Whistler awarded a | 
third-class medal, the only award he ever re- 
ceived at the Salon. | 


Joseph Pennell first met Whistler. Whistler 
elected to membership in the Society of British 
Artists, 


February 20th. Whistler gave his Ten O’Clock 
at Prince’s Hall, London, repeating it the same 
year before the British Artists and at Cambridge. 
and Oxford. Moved his studio to 454 Fulham — 
Road. Lived first in a small house, he called ‘The 
Pink Palace,” close by, and then in The va 

Chelsea. re 


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1889 


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1891 


1892 


ciety y: British Artists. 
The year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Whistler 
prepared an illuminated address from the Society 
which, in return, was allowed by the Queen to 
call itself ‘“Royal.” 

June 4th, Whistler resigned from the Royal 
‘Society of British artists. Chatto & Windus pub- 
lished Ten O’Clock in a brown paper covered 
pamphlet. Moved to the Tower House, Chelsea. 
On August 11th, married Beatrix Godwin, widow 
of E. W. Godwin. Second Class medal from the 
International Exhibition at Munich, acknowl- 
edged as “second-hand compliment.” 

Whistler made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor 
and Honorary Member of the Bavarian Royal 
Academy, eventually receiving Gold Medal and 
Cross of St. Michael. Gold medals awarded him 
at the Paris Universal Exposition and at Am- 
sterdam. To celebrate these honors a public din- 
ner given him at the Criterion, London. Official 
recognition his at last. 

Whistler moved back to Cheyne Walk, No. 21.— 
William Heinemann published The Gentle Art of 
Making Enemies. 

The Glasgow Corporation purchased the Carlyle. 
The Mother bought by the French Government 
for the Luxembourg. 

The definite Turn of the Tide. Whistler’s Ex- 
hibition of Nocturnes, Marines, and Chevalet 
Pieces at the Goupil Gallery in London—his 


i 
ita Be 


1894 


1895 
1896 
1897 


1897 


1898 


1899 


1900 


to Paris to gel ie an apartment in ae R 
du Bac, No. 110, and a studio at No. 86 Rue 
Notre Dame-des-Champs. - | 
The beginning of Mrs. Whistler’s long illness.— 
Gold Medal awarded by the Academy i in Phila- 
delphia. 

The Eden Trial before es Civil Tribunal in : 
Paris—judgment against Whistler.—Gold Medal 
from Antwerp.—A year of wandering between 
France and England in search of health for Mrs. — 
Whistler. } , 


‘Mrs. Whistler died at. Hampstead on May 10th, | 


buried at Chiswick on the 14th. Wit 
Whistler a witness for Joseph Pennell in the — 
Lithograph case brought against The Serirday 
Review. | 

Whistler took the Eden Case to the Cour de Cas- 
sation. Trial on November 17th. Judgment in 
the higher Court in Whistler’s favor. The first 
meeting of the International Society held in 
December in London. 

Whistler elected first Chara then first Presi- ta 
dent of the International Society. The first ex- _ 
hibition opened in May. Madame Carmen Rossi Ey: 
established the Académie Carmen in the Passage 
Stanislas, Paris, Whistler promising to visit the 
classes and criticize the students’ work. a 
Henry May published in Paris The Baronet and ‘ 
the Butterfly. 4 


Whistler asked Joh and E. R. Pennell to write a 


1902 
“ 


one. ae engraving at che Paris Universal Exposi- 


tion. Many journeys for his own health now be- 
gan. A flurried period between Paris and London, 
with occasional wanderings to the sea. At the end 
of the year started for Corsica. 

Winter in Corsica. The Académie Carmen closed. 
Returned in May to London, where the greater 
part of the last few years had been spent, and 
now gave up the Rue du Bac apartment and 
Paris Studio. In the early winter left London for 
Bath. 

The winter in Bath. Much weaker on his return 
to London in March. Again took a house in Chel- 
sea, No. 74 Cheyne Walk. In June went to Hol- 
land with Charles L. Freer. Was seriously ill in 
The Hague. Recovered sufficiently to return to 
No. 74 Cheyne Walk at the end of the summer. 
An invalid all winter. Received the degree of 
LL.D. from Glasgow University. Was appointed 
Chairman of the London Committee of the Art 
Department of the Universal Exposition to be 
held at St. Louis in 1904. Whistler died on Fri- 
day, July 17th. The funeral service in the old 
Chelsea Church on Wednesday, July 22d. Buried 
in the old Chiswick Graveyard where Hogarth 
lies. 


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7 


“THE ART OF WHISTLER 


I 
WHISTLER THE MAN: HIS GAYETY 


HISTLER had no private life, he once told 

| a foolish person who threatened to expose 
it. He was right. He left no chance to the modern 
nventors of private lives for the great whom 
Death has delivered into their hands. An extraor- 
_dinary thing about this extraordinary man was 
that everything he did, everything he said, became 
- public property. No one else was ever so talked 
_ about as he was during his life, as he is to this day. 
After he asked Joseph Pennell and myself to write 
‘his biography, we subscribed to Press Agencies in 
ew York, London and Paris for all newspaper 
tices of him and his work and there must be 

| “some hundred and fifty large volumes filled with 
these clippings in The Collection of Whistleriana 
_we' presented to the Library of Congress. It is un- 
believable, and no less unbelievable is the number 
‘magazine articles and books that began to be 
tten about him as soon as he was in his grave 


oat 


es 


and that continue to be written about him now, — 
when almost a quarter of a century has passed. It 
would seem as if the world could not have enough e 
_of him and his affairs. 
More extraordinary, and more unbelievable, is 


the fact that, despite all this writing and talking © 


about him, never has a man been less understood, 
more misrepresented. I do not for a minute mean 
to picture him as the Great Misunderstood to be 
wept over and defended and upheld. No one knew 
better than he-how to take care of himself. He 


would have despised tears. He was his own best 


defender. He was keen and eloquent in upholding 
his principles, fearless in living his life as he wanted 
to live it. But this is just what puzzled the public, 
the standardized public that looks upon character, 


individuality, anything different, as eccentricity. 


Whistler had enough individuality to stock a regi- 
ment. Therefore, to his own generation he was a 
poseur, a trifler, a jester, a quarrelsome mounte- 


bank. He was at no pains to correct this impression. _ 


If people choose to be bewildered, well, let him 
have the joy of catering to the bewilderment. And 
he did, with the result that the idea of the man as 


poseur and jester endures, though it has — less 


easy to deny his greatness as artist. 


I knew Whistler well during his later years; as : 
collaborator in writing his life I obtained from Jf 
others that knowledge of him in his earlier years 


‘I could not supply myself. With the facts 
at my disposal, it is clear to me how the misunder- 
standing arose. There is none so blind as he who re- 
_ fuses to see and the public has persistently refused 
_ to see not so much that Whistler was gay, a truth 
_ too obvious to escape the least observant eye, but 
that his gayety was the very keystone to his charac- 
ter. Whistler was by nature one of the gayest men 
_ who ever lived, just as he was one of the most seri- 
_ ous artists, a rare combination, incomprehensible 
_ to the average intelligence. As a man he was gayety 
1 itself. He loved to be gay, to have gay people about 
_ him, to do gay things, to be “‘joyous”—joyousness 
_ is the motive running all through The Gentle Art 
_—‘joyous” and “gay” are the two words repeated, 
_ like a beloved refrain, over and over again in his 
talk and his letters with no rival unless it is 
“amazing.” He needed to laugh, to see life humor- 
_ ously. He was an enemy to long faces. No one 
_ worked harder than he did, but he did not believe 
in doing his work as if it were a task. Until he was 
_ embittered by constant misrepresentation, he looked 
upon life as a pleasure to be made the most of joy- 
fully, not as a penance to be carried out with sighs 
and groanings. He was no Jeremiah. 

From his childhood up, his gayety struck every 
one who knew or met him. It was an incessant 
| _ anxiety to his mother, a Puritan after her fashion, 


_a distributor of tracts abroad and at home a strict 
24 Bry 


s disdalinadant With the 4 recitation. of the Psal 


the day’s routine for her children began, and the . 
chief end of her training was to keep her boys “in _ 


the straight and narrow path,” to which “high 
spirits” did not seem the surest guide. Her Diary 
is full of the heights these spirits reached in her 


Jamie during the Russian days when Major Whis- 


tler, the father, was building the railroad from St. 
Petersburg to Moscow. She was sorely troubled 


when, in public, Jamie’s ‘‘animation” called atten- — 


tion to him, for “ebullition of joy” was surprising 
to the grave and decorous St. Petersburg crowds. 
When she went shopping she preferred to take her 
_ Willie who was “rather less excitable than Jemmie 
and therefore more tractable,” the gentlest of her 
dear boys. She was no less disturbed when in the 
meantime her excitable Jamie got a good drench- 
ing out in the Canal, and when, later, at a dinner 
given her at Tsarskoé Seld, he and Willie, the 


“tractable” Willie easily led, drained their glasses 
of champagne as they stood up of their own ac- 


cord to drink Santé a ’Empereur. She could but 
note with apprehension how, at a review of troops, 
he made the officers laugh by his remarks, and at 


Peterhoff was so “saucy” as to laugh himself at 


Peter the Great’s adventures with a paint box. On 


her return to the United States, after Major Whis- 


tler’s death, this excitable spirit in her Jamie con- 


tinued to distress her for even she mistook for’ a4 


ee ) 
ee ey © ee ae 


as on 


PORTRAIT OF WHISTLER IN THE BIG 
Freer Collection 


Rh 


‘stage, every crisis, in his life. 
_ As “full of fun” he was remembered by his 

schoolmates in the Pomfret School, to which he was 

now sent, making irresistible caricatures, mimick- 
_ ing the pompous headmaster, turning the caning 
: he got for it into a lark. Nor at West Point could 
: the uniform subdue his natural gayety. As full of 
4 fun his fellow cadets also remembered him; as 
_ gay in his misdemeanors, whether flirtations with 
French maids in forbidden places at forbidden 
a hours, or absences, or carelessness in details of dress; 
‘ gay in his excuses for them—hunting for his cat, 
_ though no cadet was allowed to keep animals of 
_ any kind, was the excuse for his philandering with 
_ the French maid; gay over his mistakes in class and 
_ tumbles at cavalry drill; gay in his caricatures of 
' officers and examiners and cadets; gay when dis- 


Stry:— © - 

a “I am required to discuss silicon. Silicon is a 
B gas—” 

 ©That will do, Mr. Whistler,” said his examiner. 
“And,” said Whistler years afterward, “had sili- 
z con been a gas I would be a Major-General.” 

It was rare to find him at a loss for an answer 
e he had not the right one. 

Be “What!” said another examiner, “you do not 
know the date of the Battle of Buena Vista? Sup- 


a ap eee cer ae chs ee 
en ey eee 
Fa we is ee oe oe 4 fie 


ie oa 
0 as 


Re he 5 rs f. ‘ie ; a3 5 ings ( of 


q missed from the Academy for failure in Chemis- 


eet 
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ye? oer ye 


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Pie 


tie 


yea! ipoee you ¥ were to go out to dinner and 


began to talk of the Mexican War, and you, a West” q 
Point man, were asked the date of the pacnecy what i 


_would you do?” 


“Do?” answered Whistler, ““why, I should relies q 
to associate with people who could talk of such © 


things at dinner!” 
Again, in the United States Coast and Geodetic 
Survey office, the memories were of his gayety out 


of office hours rather than of his application in — 
them, of his irresponsible treatment of Govern- — 
ment copper plates, so that after not many months — 


every one agreed with him that Government busi- 


ness was no affair of his and that the one place 
where he belonged by right was Paris. 


The Latin Quarter was then still in all its glory, 


its joyousness as yet undimmed, La Vie de Boheme 


in full swing. Whistler knew Murger by heart and — 


loved the book. It might seem as if where to be gay 
was the rule, his gayety would pass unnoticed. And 


yet it became the talk of the Latin Quarter. The 
British students said that he was so gay he never 
worked and with them the misinterpretation of his — 
gayety began. They carried to London his reputa- 
tion as the Idle Apprentice, the youth too indefati- — 
_ gably gay to be anything else. He was gay, let no — 
one question that. He was le Petit Whistler, le petit 
blagueur, le petit rageur even to the French stu- — 


_ dents—his “‘no-shirt friends,” the British described 


a NS ee eS Se ke ON SO Ik eM 


ee ven a = 


nike 


és 


them—who had no objection to be gay themselves. 
Whatever he found to do, that he did with all his 
might. He played the Latin Quarter game accord- 


ing to rule and with unsparing zest. He dressed the 
part, his hat with the low crown and broad brim, 


straw in summer, felt in winter, set jauntily on the 


black curls, was conspicuous on the Rive Gauche 
‘where the less anybody dressed like everybody on 
the other bank, the more conventional he was. 


5 


His allowance of three hundred and fifty dollars 
a year was princely in a community where most 
_men depended on their wits. But that did not keep 
him long from the Mont de Piété, the haunt of the 
_ student. He lived up his six flights of stairs, in his 
_ garret with the best of them, would eat his wash- 


} stand one week and his wardrobe the next, as he 


explained to an American from home who had 


looked him up and was distressed to find him in 


such poverty-stricken surroundings. He would 


q 
; of his drawings and reduced him to tears. And he 
hi d friends among the professional dancers, Finette 


pawn his coat in summer and go in shirt-sleeves for 
a cooling drink, and stay a prisoner all night in 
the Halles until some one would come along and 
pay for his supper. He did his duty at the Bal Bul- 
ha and every other students’ ball in the Quarter. 

He had friends among the grisettes, Fumette of the 
Preching, Tigresse the Quartier’s name for her, the 
little modiste who in a rage one day tore up a pile 


ef, 


: eho jexeslled in Ae Cameene but is urprisingly 


stately and dignified in the portrait he etched of 4 
her. He threw himself into the life of the Quartier — 


_ so thoroughly that for the next generation he was — 


the hero of its every legend. “All stories of larks 
were put down to Whistler,” George Boughton — 


said when he, in his turn, went to Paris as a student. 


But, as Lincoln was eager to give Grant’s brand 


of whisky to his other generals, so the less stolid - 


students must have wished they could borrow 


Whistler’s brand of idleness for it was astonishing — 
how much this youth who never worked managed 
to accomplish. During the years he was establish- 
ing his reputation as Idle Apprentice he made the © 


etchings of The French Set, among his finest of any 


period; he painted La Mére Gérard, the Head of an 


Old Man Smoking, himself in the famous big hat, 
and At the Piano. This last picture was thrown out 
at the Salon of 1859 but hung in an exhibition of 
the year’s rejected held by Bonvin in his studio. 


There Courbet—the great man, the great indepen- 


dent, the great revolutionary, of the day—saw it 
and was impressed. If all students could be idly 


gay to the same purpose, the world would be over- 
crowded with masterpieces. 3 ke 


After 1859 Whistler spent less time in Ba hut 


in London where gayety never was, never could be 
a matter of course, is, rather, highly suspicious, — 
almost a crime. The Briton could make nothing of — 


Se ee ee ee 


01499170+) stavq punupy “ONVId AHL LY 


his exuberance, his high Pirits, his ROMs ie 
, original clothes. His hats disturbed all their pre- 
conceived notions of what hats should be, and they 

were paralyzed the summer day when he appeared 

‘carrying two umbrellas, a black in case of rain, a 

white in hope of sunshine. He was always ready 

for a dance or a masquerade, he played in pri- — 
Bate theatricals, he was the central figure of every 

‘party, every reception, every dinner to which he 
was bidden. Artists, oppressed with their own seri- # 
ousness, asked where was there time for serious 
work? When he went down the river and stayed 
in shabby, tumbled-down riverside inns, and was 
‘making his Thames etchings and painting his 
Thames in Ice and Wapping, there were more din- 
-ners and dances and songs, and friends to spread 
the report of them. Wherever he worked people 
. ‘were always about him. He never wanted to be by 
himself. For several years his faithful companion 


Love, is there sorrow hidden, 
Is there delight? 


he Reked when he saw her portrait in The Little 
White Girl. Jo lived with Whistler in his Cheyne 
Wall _ house until his mother arrived from the 


London. Other models came oad went. “‘Prendl 
pursued him. Hangers-on imposed upon him, but 
if they amused him they were welcome. He liked 
people, best of all those who were amusing. The 
drolleries of life—drollery, another word often in 
his mouth—appealed to him, stimulated him. It 
was the dull man he could not stand. His revolt” 
against dullness was the cause of what too often 
was mistaken for rudeness. A typical incident,” 
often quoted, is that of the American who came ~ 
up to him one evening at the Carlton Hotel and, 
as excuse, said they were both born in Lowell 
within a year of each other, and Whistler told him: © 
“I shall be born when and where I want, and I do 
not choose to be born at Lowell and I refuse to be 
sixty-seven.” This was thought shocking bad man- 
ners and an absurd denial of his age and his birth- 
place, when Whistler was simply ridding himself 
of a bore. 

In the early Sixties one of his haunts was Tudor} 
House, a little further down Cheyne Walk, where. 
Meredith and Swinburne lived with Gabriel Ros- 
setti, and where William Michael Rossetti, Sandys, 
and the amazing Howell were constant visitors. 
To the end he had an affection for Gabriel Ros- 
setti—‘the only white man in all the London 
crowd of painters,” I have heard him say, and un 
grand artiste was his description to Fantin. If his 


} 


— 


friendship for the man never aavered, his admira- 
tion for the artist soon dwindled. Rossetti painted 
the anecdote in vogue during the Victorian era, 
though it was of another kind and told in an- 
other way from the Acadernician’s. Once Rossetti 
showed Whistler his picture and read him his son- 
net inspired by the same subject. “Why not frame 
the sonnet?” asked Whistler. But Rossetti’s art was 
‘no drawback to Whistler’s joy in a certain droll 
extravagance in Rossetti’s habits and amusements. 
‘He saw humor in the sort of menagerie Rossetti 
kept i in his back garden where his “Bull of Bashan” 
‘chased him, where his monkeys escaped to the 
‘neighboring roofs and peered down upon him 
from behind chimneys, where his peacock and 
gazelle fought on the lawn. Whistler never tired of 
telling the story of the wombat, brought in after 
i dinner with the cigars to be exhibited, curling up 
in an empty cigar box, forgotten in the heat of 
; argument, and discovered, a complete skeleton, 
Borecks and weeks afterwards. And Whistler’s joy 
Bi: as irrepressible in the droll company of Ros- 
sett friends. He could laugh to the last over 
Meredith’s pomposities, his rotund periods, his 
melodramatic poses. He could delight in Swin- 
burne’s effeminate affectations as he sat at the feet 
of Mrs. Whistler and sulked if she would not call 
him Algernon. His delight was still greater in 
Frederick Sandys, always bankrupt, always on the 


5 y 
Pee 


a of ‘five Pee you knoe always magnifice it. 
Whistler saw fun even in William Michael Ros- 
setti, dull, kindly, the most unexpected sort of 

brother for Gabriel. He was rather the butt of 
some of the more outspoken in the Pre-Raphaelite _ 
_ circle. There was another evening, when William — 
_ Morris was boring them all with the story of one 
of his Norse heroes and Gabriel Rossetti could en 
dure it no longer and broke in at last to say he 4 
didn’t think much of a hero who had a dragon or 
a serpent for a brother. “I’d a great deal rather 
have a dragon for a brother than a damned fool,” 
roared Morris, and probably no more was heard — 
that evening of Norse adventurers and their rela- 
tions. But Whistler’s chief favorite was Howell— 4 
Charles Augustus Howell, one of the most pictur- — 
esque figures of a picturesque period, “the Gil- 
Blas-Robinson-Crusoe hero out of his proper 4 
time,” “the superb liar” in Whistler’s Yorss.. im- 4 
mortalized by Rossetti in a famous limerick: | 


There’s a Portuguee person called Howell, 
Who lays on his lies with a trowel; 

When I goggle my eyes, 

And start with surprise, oo 
’Tis at the monstrous bet lies told by Howell ) 


rele G140Ms. A ™M “ALL AHL HLIM ANOTV SANVLLIUE JO pide aHL 


ere e early London years, Whis- 
7 G tler’s laughter was never embittered. He played “ i 
4 hard because to him life was impossible without ; 
3 play. He worked harder because art was his ab- 
I sorbing interest. The pictures this trifler, this Idle 
_ Apprentice, was painting at the time, live to-day, 
almost all fill a distinguished place in national col- is 
 Jections—The Music Room, Alone with the Tide, 
The Blue Wave, The Last of Old Westminster, ty 
- The White Girl. Not even the turning down of k 
_ The White Girl at the Royal Academy in 1862 ca) 
disturbed, if it disappointed him. Besides, it fared ae 
much as At the Piano had fared in Paris, its rejec- 
tion proving, if anything, an asset. An exhibition 
of the Academy’s rejected was held in the Berners 
Street Gallery where The White Girl was hung, ‘ 
catalogued as The Woman in White, the title of se ; 
Wilkie Collins’ then widely read novel. The title led : 
a clever critic, who thought the painting a “bizarre 7 
production,” to point out that the face was well 
4 done, but it was not that of Mr. Wilkie Collins’ 
- Woman in White, and this criticism led to Whis- 
 tler’s first letter to the press. Nothing could sound _ % 
Jess like Whistler, not a hint in it of the letters 
that were later to exasperate “the serious ones of i 
this earth” and to be collected in The Gentle Art. : 
it explains simply, quite amiably, “I had no in- 


ahs 


ge a or: 
-y 


s’ novel; it so happens, indeed, that Ihave never : 
ay 


<m 
1 ae 


tention whatever of illustrating Mr. Wilkie Col- 
lin 


20 | THE ART OF 


read it.” But because the letter is not remarkable, — 


because it is so different from the letters preserved 
in The Gentle Art, it holds an important place in 
any study of Whistler, characteristic of him as he 
was before forced to arm himself in self-defense. 

He could take hard knocks as well as any man. 
He knew that his paintings were not “uncouth,” 
“smudgy,” “eccentric,” “empty” and the other 
things they were called by British critics. But he 
was wise from the start, and he knew also that it 
was better to have foolish adjectives hurled at his 
pictures than no adjectives at all, and he put up 
with them in silence except if a blunder was made, 
as in the case of The White Girl. When the criti- 
cism was poisoned and meant to kill, he realized 
that silence was a mistake, especially as, with his 
keen vision and extreme sensitiveness, he could see 
and feel that the critics were carrying the public 
with them, that gradually he was being laughed 
at, not with. He accepted in the same silence the 
description of that perfect picture of Jo, The Litile 
White Girl, as “a bizarre biped,”—bizarre appar- 
ently a favorite among his critics’ adjectives. But 
when the vials of ridicule and wrath were poured 
upon The Two Little White Girls he could remain 
silent no longer. And after the exhibition of that 
painting in the Royal Academy of 1867, he began 
to let loose the arrows of his wit until a frightened 


239-7Rk EP ES 3 


EN ee a 


WHISTLER 21 


world shrank in dismay and he gained a new repu- 
tation as quarrelsome, a man to whom battle was 
the spice of life, deliberate in his eccentricity, ex- 
travagant in his pose—a charlatan. 


| I a 
_ WHISTLER THE MAN: HIS BITTERNESS 


HISTLER painted the Two Little White — 
| Girls with, if anything, more than the 
usual enthusiasm he threw into his work. He wrote — 
of it exultantly, despairingly to Fantin. It was ag 
harmony in color—an Arrangement in White; — 
also a harmony in line—see the wonderful arrange- _ 
ment of the arms of the two figures—Tiens, and — 
he made a little sketch of it in his letter. But the 
harmony bristled with difficulties. He scraped it 
out, rubbed it out, deplored his training—why — 
could he not have studied under Ingres? and have 
_ begun by learning something of drawing?—Of this _ 
_ harmony the critics naturally understood nothing, 2 | 
_ but to their density he was accustomed. He 4q 
_ shrugged his shoulders when Burty—though dis- s 
appointed that it should be a French critic—dis- 
covered irony in the Academy’s willingness tohang 
the picture and regretted the painter’s falling away _ 
_ from his early promise. But the English critic 
_ Hamerton’s pontifical dullness was more than he 
could bear in silence. bie 


P] 


THE MUSIC ROOM, HARMONY IN GREEN AND ROSE 


Freer Collection 


arbiter te. He dabbled j in art to the point of 

- believing himself an authority. At the famous 
_ Salon of the Refused in 1863 he had laughed with 
- the crowd in front of The White Girl, and gloried 
_ in it. Now at the Academy in 1867, in front of 
The Two Little White Girls, Symphony in White 
~ No. 111, he was too insulted to laugh. A Symphony 
in White indeed? Why, he wrote in The Saturday 
_ Review, one girl has a yellowish dress and a bit of 
blue ribbon, the other has a red fan, and, besides, 
he could see green leaves and flowers. “There is a 
girl in white on a white sofa, but even this girl has 
_ reddish hair, and, of course, there is the flesh color 
of the complexion.” Such stupidity was beyond 
_ Whistler’s endurance and he let himself go in a 
_ letter zons away from the first mild protest of 
—-1863: 

Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect white 
a hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his 
_ astounding consequence, believe that a Symphony 
in F contains no other note, but shall be a con- 
tinued repetition of F F F? . . . Fool!” 

_ The letter seems to have frightened the editor 
4 of The Saturday Review and it was not published 
a many years after. For Whistler it was the 


note—a note of raillery, of ridicule, I might have 


26 THE ART OF 


written a note of malice had he not told me once, 
“I may be wicked, but malicious never!” He was ' 
hurt and bitterness was in the gayety. Before the 
world, he kept up his brave face,—his wicked face. 
One after another they came now, those wonder- 
ful little notes, those wonderful little controversies 
that he saved from oblivion, or old newspaper files, 
by collecting them in The Gentile Art of Making 
Enemies. The present generation can scarcely credit 
the terror they inspired. And the more evident was 
the terror, the wickeder was the attack. You can 
see by the twirls and darts of the Butterfly’s tail 
with the sting in it, the signature of these letters, 
what rollicking fun he was having with “the ene- 
mies.” The sting grew to be a terror in itself, re- 
vealing at a glance the humor of the writer. 

By this time whatever Whistler did was twisted 
into evil or eccentricity in a land where conven- 
tion rules. The harmless Butterfly created as un- 
speakable a scandal as his hats and his Harmonies. 
He used it first in his pictures, and to sign a picture 
in that fashion simply “was not done” in correct 
studios. All sorts of meaning were, and are, in- 
vented for it that would surprise no one more than 
Whistler. One ingenious writer recently proved it 
to be Whistler’s portrait. He could have seen only a 
few Butterflies signed to prints and drawings and 
letters when he discovered eyes, mouth, nose, even 


po whit 


tion ee ‘not ait aa the Sainee in chet 
Biches into any resemblance to a man’s face. 
The evolution of the Butterfly is simple. It grew 
_ out of the interwining of his initials J.M.W. Whis- 
 tler evolved a Butterfly in which at first the initials 
were scarcely visible save to the initiated. He was 
still under the influence of the Japanese and he 
9 placed the Butterfly in a little panel, as the Japanese 
artist placed the inscription on a color print, low 
in the corner of his picture, or half way up, or 
wherever it best carried out or fitted into the com- 
_ position. He sometimes let it wander over the frame 
which for several years he designed himself. 
Gradually the Butterfly was freed from Japanese 
influence until, in the later signatures, it is as hard 
to find as the initials are in the earlier. : 
‘Until the end of the Sixties Whistler had been 
fairly well treated. Almost every year his pictures 
and prints had been accepted by the Academy. But 
the ribaldry of the critics had its effect, and his 
persistent refusal to paint the fashionable anecdote, 
~ to emulate Academicians in searching encylopedias 
and classical dictionaries for subjects told against 
him with Academic juries. When he began to call 
* - pictures Symphonies, Arrangements, Nocturnes, 
q the limit of Academic patience was reached. Cer- 
tainly, after the exhibition of the portrait of his” 


| a : TA chderse walls, and it a: not have bees hung 4 
that spring had not Boxall—‘the one white man” — 
in the Academic crowd—threatened to resign if it 4 
was rejected. The Royal Academy at that period 4 
set the standard not only for British artists but for 4 
the British public. If Whistler was not Academi- — 
~ cally recognized, the layman could but ignore him. — 
_ If the critics jeered aloud, timid artists could ven- — 
ture only to whisper their praise in private. 
_ His contemporaries were unwilling to take him — 
seriously but they could not stop thinking about — 
him, they could not stop talking about him. Every- 
thing he did was made public property and, by the a 
Seventies, not one little shred of his private life — 
_ was left. Everything he did was distorted, exag- 
gerated. He was a man of quick, of violent, temper 
and gossip spread incredible tales of him as a quar- _ 
relsome fellow. Whistler never sought a quarrel, 
but if forced into one, he fought in dead earnest. — 
~ Rossetti’s limerick was not unwarranted: : 


oa 


There’s a combative artist named W histler 
Who is, like his own hog-hairs, a bristler: 


* Note—It might as well be explained here that Whistler q 
had a way, disconcerting to the cataloguer, of changing his 
-. titles. His Arrangements in Gray and Black sometimes became — 
_ Arrangements in Black, just as a Harmony in Flesh Color and 4 

Pink ert again figure as fa in fags eae nie! 


> 


THE WHITE GIRL 
SYMPHONY IN WHITE, 


NO. I 


J. H. Whittemore 


i Canad inh on the eid 
Offer varied attractions to Whistler. 


well realized. When, after a quarrel with Seymour 
_ Haden, he was expelled from the Burlington Fine 
- Arts Club, Gabriel Rossetti and his brother Wil- 
liam Michael resigned, both outraged by the way 
he had been treated. They knew he was in the 
a right, and the curious part of it is that Whistler, 
_ with rare exceptions, was in the right. His code was 
“If a man. gives you the lie to your face, why, 
q naturally you hit him.” The public fancied that he 
hit at random, without provocation, out of bad 
: ‘temper or to set people talking. It was fortunate 
for Whistler that, though extremely sensitive, he 
had a rare sense of humor—of fun. He felt the un- 
justified misunderstanding of himself and his Woe 
but “he always laughed his troubles away.” If 
ee people were determined to be fooled, he would fool 
_ them to the top of poor bent and, in “‘surround- — 
_ ings of antagonism,” wrap himself in “a species of 
BP sicidestanding. » If they wanted to talk, he 
Be yould give them something to talk about in good 
py. earnest. 
He was never so deliberately outrageous as in 


wz 


he Seventies and Eighties. Never was his “Ha! 


32 THE ART OF 


shrill, so penetrating, so far-reaching. He intensi- 
fied the eccentricities of his dress which hitherto, - 
eccentric as it seemed to others, he had merely 
adapted to his own taste and comfort. His overcoat 
grew longer, his hat higher, his cane taller and 
slimmer. He would go out to dinner without a 
necktie. The jauntiness of his curls increased. He 
cultivated the white lock into prominence. When 
that white lock first appeared there is no exact 
record. But in the Seventies it was added to his mis- 
demeanors, his eccentricities. Many people have had 
white locks of the kind without attracting much 
attention. Whistler’s was another public scandal. 
Its origin was variously explained—it was heredi- 
tary, it was the result of the gunfire he was under 
at the Valparaiso bombardment, it was an affecta- 
tion, a deliberate eccentricity, and when Whistler 
knew this was the general opinion, the white lock 
was more in evidence than before. 

It was the same with his daily habits at home. 
Oftener than not it pleased him to have people 
about him in the studio; the world said disgraceful, 
no artist could do honest work before an audience; 
and Whistler flung the studio door wider open than 
ever. He loved to entertain, and gossip frowned as 
if for an artist to entertain was unheard of. He 
gave Sunday breakfasts, preferring the French 
hour of noon and French dishes to early, stodgy 
British breakfasts, and a horrified public denounced 


a hi or the single tall lily—were as unusual. 
Worst crime of all was Whistler’s habit of keeping 
his guests waiting. Lord Wolseley was one of them 
on the unspeakable Sunday when he chose the 
breakfast hour for his morning bath, his splashing 
heard in the drawing-room while Howell kept the 
_ party together by his charm until Whistler ap- 
peared, smiling, fresh in white duck, for it was 
summer. 
If he was late in his own house as host, he was 
later as guest in other people’s houses, and this was 
more unpardonable. Black looks did not disturb 
his serenity or modulate the shrill “Ha! ha!” Those 
who could edged away from him when they heard 
it, dreading to be mixed up in the wickedness of 
which it was the prelude. He no longer needed 


inspired I was once the witness—in the Nineties 
when Joseph Pennell and I persuaded him to go to 
the dinner of the Society of Illustrators of which 
he was a Vice-President. There he would be among 
a new generation of young men who could ap- 
_ preciate the honor of his presence. He refused to 
_ sit at the high table, it was his first public appear- 
ance after his wife’s death, and he took a less con- 
i _ spicuous place with Heinemann and ourselves. We 
= ere hardly seated when, to our horror, we saw 


it for defense when I knew him but of the fear it | 


ee 


oS 
as 


ai br me a 


ee 

Pt 
ba 

on 


i ae Haden, broken ee “aa ‘enemy” be- : 
_ yond redemption. With the soup, Whistler caught 4 
sight of Haden. He stuck his monocle in his eye, 
_ “Ha! ha!” rang out joyously. Haden gave one — 
- frantic look towards us, dropped his spoon, and — 
ran. But this incident helped me to understand a 
_ the power of that “Ha! ha!” during the two dec- 
ades when it was a warning and a defense, when _ 
_ Whistler’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb and 
his reputation as charlatan most widely spread. _ 
They were the decades when he was painting 
one great portrait after another—the Mother, the 
Carlyle, the Miss Alexander, the Mrs. Huth, the 
Leyland, the Rosa Corder, the Lady Archibald — 
Campbell, the Lady Meux, the Sarasate. What Eng- 
lishman of the time who held him in contempt had 
such a showing to make? It was the period also of — 
the great Nocturnes, night rendered in its mystery q 
and loveliness as no painter had ever rendered it be- 
_ fore. He knew he was doing good work. When it _ 
was passed by and the commonplaces of the popular 
painter extolled, is it any wonder that he was em-' 
_ bittered? And, as if he had not enough to endure 
_ from the attitude of the public and the critics, 
_ disaster after disaster was leading to the ruin of © 
his private affairs. Indeed, it was disaster all oo 4 
way through the Seventies. : 


3 ee ; as i : a rf “ ro F 
raat: ” Rhee. Gee | 
B a Se ; i=" 


i a ae op. +. ” Eat ie ot 
THE BALCONY, HARMONY IN FLESH COLOUR AND GREEN 


Freer Collection 


friend and ‘most liberal patron, Frederick Leyland, 
‘the Liverpool Medici,” Whistler called him. Ley- 
and bought the Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine 
and hung it above the mantelpiece in the dining- 
room of his Prince’s Gate Mansion. The decorations 
of the room clashed with the color scheme of the 

- painting and Whistler suggested alterations in 
them. One change led to another and when the 
alterations were finished, in 1877, Whistler had 
transformed the dining-room into the famous Ar- 
_ rangement of Gold upon Blue, Blue upon Gold— 
q the Peacock Room. All through the summer he 
_ worked sna fever of excitement, up at six; the day 
spent on ladders and scaffoldings, and in ham- 
mocks, as he painted walls and ceilings; to bed late 
with “eyes full of sleep, and peacock feathers.” 
_ Leyland was away most of the time at Speke Hall, 
his house by the sea near Liverpool. Whistler’s 
4 friends—he had a few—were uneasy. What will 
_ Leyland say? they asked, had he consulted Leyland? 
“Why should 1?” was Whistler’s answer. “I am 
_ doing the most beautiful thing that ever has been 
4 done, you know, the most beautiful room.” 

He gave receptions, issued invitations, held pri- 
vate views. What Leyland thought when he came 
back he expressed plainly in his check for one 
housand pounds, instead of the two thousand 


 &§ 
hte 


guineas Whistler considered his due. Whistler was 


ee i) 
7s eae 


38 THE ART OF 


furious, really not so much for being paid half the 
sum for which he asked as for being paid in pounds. 
To the end, few things made him more indignant 
than to be given a pound instead of a guinea, the 
one little shilling seeming to count for more in his” 
eyes than the other twenty put together. He had — 


not finished the decoration on the space of wall 


opposite the Princesse. He refused to leave the | 
house until he had. On the blue background he ~ 
painted two gold Peacocks, one with claws greedily — 
clutching the scattered gold coins, the other spread- © 
ing wide his golden wings in superb and insolent — 
scorn—“The Rich Peacock and the Poor Peacock,” — 


Whistler said, and 


“You know, there Leyland will sit at dinner, his — 


back to the Princesse and always before him the 
Apotheosis of l’art et Pargent.” 


Whistler scored, as he always did but, though a — 


satisfaction, it was no help out of the difficulties he 
was now in head over heels. 


Later in the same year, 1877, after the Peacock © 


Room was finished, Whistler was well represented 
in the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, 
invited by Sir Coutts Lindsay, its founder. The fun 
poked at his Nocturnes and Arrangements—at his 
“materialized spirits and figures in a London fog” 
—he let pass lightly. “Ha! ha!” was enough for 
that kind of criticism. But another kind to which 
he was now subjected he could not and would not 


— 


il iy ig hears 


of his sti of Beech of the nature of 


which Whistler was in complete ignorance—wrote 
a notice of the Grosvenor in Fors Clavigera for 
July 2, 1877, in it the often-quoted sentence: 
i “Eor Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for 
the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay 
ought not to have admitted works in the gallery 
in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so 
“nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. 
: have seen and heard much of cockney impudence 
before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb 
_ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint 
_in the public’s face.” 
“Sounds rather like libel,” George Boughton said 

; to Whistler the afternoon he had the pleasure of 
. - reading this at the Arts Club. 
_ *Well—that I shall try to find out,” said Whis- 
_tler, and he did at the Trial, as momentous an event 
in his career as the Peacock Room and the opening 
j of the Grosvenor Gallery. 
In anticipation the Trial was “nuts and nectar” 
to Ruskin, “the greatest lark for a long time in the 
- Courts,” to Charles Keene who should have known 
better. In court, however, it was Whistler who 
4 scored again. He won his case. He made Judge, 
Counsel and witnesses ridiculous. But the triumph 


Ju dgment was given for him without costs, dam- 


s ruinous. Artists were mostly on the other side. 


40 THE ART OF 


ages were valued at a farthing. At once a collection 
was taken up to pay the costs of Ruskin who could 
well afford to pay them himself. For Whistler, pen- 
niless, there was no collection, only the suggestion. 
He laughed this trouble too away. “In the event 
of a subscription,” he wrote his solicitor, “I would” 
willingly contribute my own mite.” | 

All the same, he realized how little of a laughing ~ 
matter it was. By this time his affairs were in a_ 
hopeless mess. The Peacock Room had left him one 
thousand guineas poorer than he expected to be. 
The Trial, though he won, added to his debts. And © 
as luck would have it, shortly before, encouraged — 
by the sale of some of his pictures, the invitation — 
to exhibit in the Grosvenor, and the expectation or — 
promise of students, he had undertaken to build © 
a house in which he would have his first real studio — 
—the White House. He was therefore facing 
unusually heavy expenses. It was inevitable that — 
the next court in which he found himself should 
be the Bankruptcy Court. 

His debts kept on multiplying and creditors 
were alarmed. Architects and builders were not 
working for nothing. Greengrocers and fishmon- 
gers pursued him with bills. Tax collectors were 
about. He kept borrowing money, here, there, ev- 
erywhere, pawning his pictures, getting out his — 
printing press and going back to etching, trying 
lithography for the first time. Bailiffs in the house 


THE LITTLE WHITE GIRL, SYMPHONY IN WHITE, NO. 2 
With Permission of the National Gallery, London 


jes eee a ; 
WHISTLER 43 
became a matter of course. And, as far as the world 
could see, his gayety had seldom been so unre- 
strained. One might have thought the bailiffs were 
provided to amuse his guests. He disguised them as 
butlers at his Sunday breakfasts—‘liveried attend- 
ants’—they had to be put to some use, he ex- 
plained. 

“Wonderful fellows,” he told his breakfast party 
one Sunday, “you will see how excellently they wait 
at table and to-morrow, you know, well, if you 
want, you can see them sell the chairs you sit on 
every bit as well. Amazing!” | 

Your servants seem to be extremely attentive,” 
a guest said to him another Sunday. 

“Oh, yes,” said Whistler, “I assure you they 
wouldn’t leave me.” 

To the bailiff who asked to be paid because of 
his own financial misfortunes, Whistler’s answer 
was “Ha! ha! you must have a man in yourself, 
you know.” 

When the time of the sale approached he wrote 
to the people he invited to Sunday breakfast that 
they would know the house by the bills stuck up on 
st. He rebelled only when the posters were hung 
without sufficient care. When he saw them loosened 
by rain, flapping in the wind, he roused the bailiff 
though it was midnight, made him fetch a ladder 
and paste them down securely. He would not put 
up with slovenliness as long as he was living in the 


— house. He iS the mechan of creditors as if they 
were got up for his delight. He was but more dan- | 

_ dified as the money to pay for dandyism vanished. 
His coat seemed to grow longer than ever, his hat — 
higher, his curls curlier, his monocle more startling. © 
“Ha! ha!” was his greeting. “Well, you know, here} 
I am in the City.” __ | 
Inextinguishable his laughter, but those who 
knew Whistler knew the keen suffering it disguised. — 
He was declared a bankrupt in May, 1879, he was — 
sold out, he had not a penny in the world, and he — 
laughed. : 
The Fine Art Society came to the rescue with a © 
commission for twelve etchings in Venice. He left — 
in his studio, in anticipation of the sale, three cruel — 
caricatures of Leyland, one the horrible but beau- — 
tiful Filthy Lucre, or The Gold Scab, the “Liver- — 
pool Medici” breaking out in an eruption of gold — 
as he sits at his piano, the bitterest caricature an — 
artist ever imagined, now in the collection of Mrs. — 
Spreckels. Over his front door he wrote: ee 7 
the Lord build the house, they labor in vain Sesh 
build it. E. W. Godwin, F.S.A., built this one.” 
Then he packed up his copper in and started — 
for Venice in the autumn of 1879. His troubles pur- ; 
sued him. He heard of the disappearance of pictures — 
that the Bankruptcy sale could not account for, the _ 
Fine Art Society wrote indignantly when the etch- | 
ings were not done on time—as if Whistler could 


we f ‘. a ee AT 

. “ss eae Ver? Yea? ats 

ee ee! ry TL eet os SS ae i \ 

+ aed th c - Ms ro 

a Seay Been tee 5 
Bay a, ‘ é : 4 


ae 


a 
e 
> 

: 


s 


have done anything on time, indifferent to the 


quality of what he was doing. He was desperately 


_ poor, so poor he would say he was living on ““cat’s 


meat and cheese parings.” Heaven knows what 
would have become of him if Maud, the model who 
now replaced Jo, had not hurried down to Venice 
to look after him, to pose for him, to cook for him, 
to see to the comfort so essential to him when he 
worked, and in the social distraction as essential to 


his well-being, getting up frugal feasts to which he 


could summon his friends. At least Venice was re- 
freshingly free of “the enemies.” He was among 
friends. The Brownings, Curtises and Bronsons who 
were residents, could appreciate him, their palace 
doors were open to him. The town was full of art- 
ists who believed in his art, asked nothing better 
than to be with him. Duveneck and “Duveneck’s 
boys” had come up from Florence. Venetian and 
Spanish artists were as sympathetic. It was like a 
revival of the old Quartier Latin life, talks over 
dinner in friendly little restaurants or, when he 
could not afford it, in his own place, talks over 
coffee at the Quadri or Florian’s in the Piazza, at 
the Orientale on the Riva. It was a life he loved. 
And he never worked harder. His etchings of Ven- 
ice and his Venice pastels were made during these 
months. Once he finished them, he had finished 
with Venice. He knew that for the artist who is 


not a native, too long a stay in Venice is death. He 


ee 


, 
ae 


‘0: AR OF 
did not run the risk that for a while threatened a 
ruin to Duveneck’s art, perhaps accomplished it. 
Late in 1880 Whistler returned to London. “The 
Islanders,’ his name for the English, must have 
drawn a long sigh of relief at his departure, no 
longer going in fear of the dreaded ‘tHa! ha!” And 
then, suddenly, without warning, wickeder than 
ever, wearing a Venetian overcoat with three capes 
that would have sent shivers through Sackville 
Street, acquiring a dog to lend the last bewildering 
touch, he reappeared in London, in Bond Street, 
at the Fine Art Society’s. Here he found an exhibi- 
tion of Twelve Great Etchers, a press in the Gal- 
lery and Goulding printing. 
“Well, you know, I was just home,” was the i 
story as he told it to me, “nobody had seen me, and ; 
I drove up in a landau. Nobody expected me. In : 
: 
é 


“ , lee 
— <= 


one hand I held my long cane, with the other I 
led by a ribbon a beautiful little white Pomeranian 
dog; it too had turned up suddenly. As I walked in é 
I spoke to no one but, putting up my glass, I looked j 
at the prints on the walls! ‘Dear me! Dear me!’ I 
said. ‘Still the same old sad work. Dear me!? And 
Haden was there, talking hard to Brown and lay- 
ing down the law, and as he said ‘Rembrandt,’ I 
said ‘Ha! ha!’ and he vanished and then—” 
There was the Whistler London knew in the 
Eighties—doing the unexpected cruelly, dressing 
the part extraordinarily, tormenting a conventional _ | 


TRETE 


THOMAS CARLYLE, 
ARRANGEMENT IN GREY AND BLACK, NO. 2 
Corporation Art Gallery, Glasgow 


public shockingly, and dropping his “Ha! ha’s!” 
like bombs in their midst. Not that his troubles 
were at an end. Far from it. He was as desperately 
_ poor as in Venice. He at first took a bare barn of a 
studio in the Fulham Road, he and Maud living 
close by in an unpretending little cottage which he 
called the Pink Palace. M. Théodore Duret was 
having his portrait painted to test Whistler’s theory 
that a man should be painted in the clothes of his 
period, however hopeless, that color could be got 
even out of modern evening dress. When Duret 
went for a sitting and to dine afterwards with 
Whistler and Maud, he would carry a bottle of 
wine in one pocket and some fruit or cake in an- 
other, sure beforehand of the bareness of their 
larder. For the first few years nobody commis- 
sioned a portrait save Lady Meux who should be 
remembered for her independence, her daring and 
her appreciation, even if she could treat him to 
occasional polite Billingsgate. Whistler exhibited 
his Twelve Etchings at the Fine Art Society’s. To 
the critics they were “another crop of Whistler’s 
little jokes.” A year later he exhibited his pastels 
in the same Gallery, decorating it, making it an 
Arrangement in Gold and Brown, for he believed 
that beautiful work should be beautifully shown. 
The public shrieked, rocked with laughter. Some- 
_ body at the Private View asked the price of a pastel: 
“Sixty guineas? Why, that’s enormous!” 


Whistler always these  everyaana especially # 


what he was not intended to hear. 


_ “Ha! ha! Enormous!” he laughed in his turn. — 
“Why, not at all. I can assure you it took me quite 


half an hour to do it—” a reécho of the Trial, this. 

One day at the door of the Gallery he met a 
patron of art and his wife coming out from the 
exhibition, both looking bored to death. At sight 
of him the patron chuckled, shook hands warmly. 

“We have both been looking at your things and 
have been so much amused.” 

“And,” said Whistler to me years afterwards, “ 
laughed with him. I always did with people of that 
kind, and then they said I was not serious.” 

Another exhibition of etchings—the second 
Venetian series—was held, again at the Fine Art 
Society’s, in 1883, the Gallery this time an Ar- 
rangement in Yellow and White, the Catalogue a 
rare mixture of Whistler’s gayety and seriousness. 
Below the title of each print he quoted from some 
unfortunate critic’s pronouncement in the past. 
Or here is his own ine in a letter to Waldo 
Story: 

“I take, my dear Waldo, all that I have collected 
of the silly drivel of the wise fools who write, and 
I pepper and salt it about the catalogue . . . in short, 
I put their nose to the grindstone and turn the 
wheel with a whir! I give ’em Hell! quoting old 


Solomon about the fool to my heart’s content. The mee 


WHISTLER $1 
mols thing is a joy—and indeed a masterpiece of 
mischief.” 

On the title page he printed the text: “Out of 
their own mouths shall ye judge them.” 

The next year, 1884, the exhibition was chiefly 
of water-colors, at Dowdeswell’s. The Gallery was 
an Arrangement in Flesh Color and Gray, a new 
affectation to the critics, another offense to the 
public, though the public crowded to be offended 
every time. Whistler’s report of the Pastel Exhibi- 
tion was: “Bond Street siLockeD. All trafic 
suspended. No. Amazing!” 

Whistler did his best to encourage the bewilder- 
ment. At the Yellow and White Exhibition he 
wore yellow socks and his attendants, yellow neck- 
ties. Little yellow and white butterflies were dis- 
tributed. He wrote the details to Waldo Story: 
“Fancy the Princess [the Princess of Wales] with 
the Butterfly! Amazing—and Lady Archie [Archi- 
bald Campbell] with one on her shoulder and one 
on her hat.” According to an interviewer, Sir 
Edmund Gosse went home from the Gallery with 
the Golden Butterfly perched on the summit of his. 
top hat conspicuously, and he all unconscious of its 
presence there. This was in the days when preten- 
tious painters showed their work in solemn gal- 
leries draped with heavy red velvet, lit by artificial 
light, rows of chairs in front of the masterpiece 
for the worshipers, leaflets of explanation dis- 


we ‘ 


MO 
Zee 


2 o 


Soe a 
tributed at the door. How could the abtice be ace 
cepted as serious who chose to appear in fantastic — 
dress, top hat dipped low over his nose, tight- — 
fitting frock coat, long wand-like cane, pink bows — 
on his pumps—or so it was said—in a gallery filled 
with light and color and joyousness? Absurdity in — 
his costume, absurdity in his work, absurdity in the _ 
decoration of his exhibition gallery—deliberate 
absurdity, that is what people said. Whistler has his — 
revenge now that he is hailed as master and his 
scheme for the arrangement of an exhibition is 
almost universally adopted. 

In the midst of the general misunderstanding, 
little straws began to show the observant man which 
way the wind was presently to blow. A younger 
generation was arising who did not accept their 
Gospel from the Academy. A group of young 
men began to gather about Whistler. They saw 
beyond the long cane, the white lock, the three- 
decked cape of his overcoat, the hat tipped over 
his eye, beyond that still more extraordinary com- 
bination of the same un-English hat and wand-like 
cane with long black frock coat, white waistcoat 
and white trousers. They understood. As every 
master does in time, he drew to him devoted dis- 
ciples. The public still howled, the Academy was 
still scornful, but the Society of British Artists 


begged him to join as member and shortly elected i‘ 
him their President. The Society had not then, has 


& 


Win, coe aol a 


CICELY HENRIETTA, MISS ALEXANDER, 
HARMONY IN GREY AND GREEN 


With Permission of the National Gallery, London 


ee 


A ae But the incident brought a ray of 
| ght in the darkness of misunderstanding. The 
awn of recognition was not far off. 


ihn ips DS eps RY Be Le ay 
a gy re ? oe 


Ii 


WHISTLER THE ARTIST: HIS SERIOUSNESS 


S Whistler was the gayest of men, so was he 

the most serious of artists, and not to realize 

the fact is to fail to appreciate him. From the be- 
ginning those two opposing sides of his character 
were equally in evidence. Those who knew him as 
a child remembered the high spirits that disturbed 
his mother no more vividly, than the pencil that 
was forever in his hand. An old friend of Whistler’s, 
a Mrs. Livermore, was living when Joseph Pennell 
and I first began to collect material for his Life 
and the pencil figures in the earliest memories she 


had for us. When she called on Mrs. Whistler 


shortly after the birth of “Willy’—Dr. Whistler— 
““Jemmie”’ was not to be found. 

“I went softly about the room until I saw a very 
small form prostrate and at full length on the shelf 
under the dressing table, and I took hold of an 
arm and a leg and placed him on my knee, and ~ 
then said, “What were you doing, dear, under the — 


table?’ ‘I’se drawing,’ and in one very beautiful 


little hand he held the pape in the other mee 
pencil.” i 
56 


WA 


The story is continued in Mrs. Whistler’s Diary 
of the St. Petersburg days. Her notes were not only 
of the scrapes her excitable boy got into, but of his 
delight in fine pictures, his despair over the loss of 
a drawing lesson in school, his eagerness to start 
for his classes at the Academy of Fine Arts after 
his admission there as student. One evening Sir 
William Allen, ‘the great Scotch artist” in his time 
and to-day forgotten, was taking tea with the 
Whistlers and the talk turned to a picture he was 
painting. 

“This made Jemmie’s eyes express so much in- 
terest that his love for art was discovered, and Sir 
William must needs see his attempts. When my 
boys said good-night, the great artist remarked to 
me, ‘Your little boy has uncommon genius, but do 
not urge him beyond his inclinations.’ I told him 
his gift had only been cultivated as an amusement, 
and that I was obliged to interfere, or his applica- 
tion would confine him more than we approved.” 

Whistler already suffered from rheumatism in 
the St. Petersburg years. One winter he was kept 
in bed several weeks by an unusually severe attack. 

“What a blessing,” his mother writes, “is such a 
contented temper as his, so grateful for every kind- 
ness and rarely complains. He is now enjoying a 
huge volume of Hogarth’s engravings, so famous 
in the Gallery of Artists. We put the immense book 

on the bed, and draw the great easy chair close up, 


tbs SUT Eh | RS mer oh 
58 : THE ART OF 


so that he can feast upon it wielone facoe Hel 
said, while so engaged yesterday, ‘Oh, how I wish 
I were well; I want so to show these engravings to : 
my drawing-master; it is not every one who has” 3 
a chance of seeing Hogarth’s own engravings of his 
originals’; and then added in his own happy way, © 
‘and if I had not been ill, mother, perhaps no one 
would have thought of showing them to me.’” 
It was the same story over again in Pomfret, in 
West Point, in the Coast Survey office. Pen, pencil 
and etching needle kept him busy, in all places, at 
all hours, in all seasons—always. Whatever else he 
might neglect, he never grudged a minute to art. — 
As a Cadet he was at the head in drawing, however 
near the tail in his other classes. He might show an © 
uncadetlike levity at drill or in barracks, but never 
at the drawing lesson. He already had an appre- 
ciation of his own aims and methods and their 
rightness. He was indignant when Robert W. Weir, — 
the master, not content to criticize, attempted to 
correct or improve his work. When he saw Weir one 
day coming with a brush freshly filled with India 
ink, Whistler shielded his drawing with his hand 
and begged “Oh, don’t, sir, don’t! You'll spoil it.” 
The tradition of his gayety lingered in Paris— 
the gayety of the Idle Apprentice. The record of his 
seriousness as artist is in the work he did there as 
student. He already proved in the life he lived what 
he afterwards expressed in words, “Art and joy go 


VALPARAISO BAY, NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND GOLD, 
Freer Collection 


_ that he danced with enthusiasm. What everybody 

did not see was the greater enthusiasm, the greater 
concentration with which he etched the portraits 
of his partners. He loafed in cafés and restaurants 
_ with Drouet the sculptor and Becquet the musician, 
: but they had to pay for his friendship by posing for 
him, and there was no blague, no farce, in posing 
for Whistler. He ran up bills for breakfasts and 
i dinners at Lalouette’s restaurant and settled for 
them, with good interest compounded, in the fame 
of his etching of Bibi Lalouette, the daughter of 
the house. Wherever he went, whatever his mis- 
sion, somebody had to pose: Delatre, the printer, 
Riault, the engraver, Bibi Valentin, child of an- 
other engraver, Astruc, editor of L’ Artiste. The 


est lark of all was his tramp to Alsace with Ernest 
Delannoy, the complete Bohemian Whistler was 
supposed to be. Impayable, was George Meredith’s 
word for Whistler’s story of this tramp and their 
adventures when their money ran out and they had 
to draw the peasants and innkeepers by the way 


the straw. It was the season of autumn fairs and 
_ in despair they joined a lady who played the trom- 
| bone and a gentleman who played the violin and 
i four gave performances of “two arts” for a 


greater the lark, the richer the harvest. The great-_ 


SER eee ee oe eel ae EN. cei Samet Brees Sos 
eT ea ge a Ne on cal ea a ey er St 


- for food and lodging, or go hungry and sleep in — 


os 
aes ie EE neta 
Stay ee 


_ -~ 4 
~ ¥ wee 
tae LS, 


5 SS ee 


Po at 


a actale 


Bho im 4 


Ry 


Pe Ft 
ee 
owt 


ad 


a, we at 9 


¢ 


62 THE ART OF 


few sous. But from this vagabond tramp Whistler 
brought back to Paris most of the etchings pub- 
lished in The French Set, now the envy of artists, 
an investment for dealers and collectors. Had the 
myth of the Idle Apprentice never been invented, 
the talk would have been of the seriousness of the 
American student in Paris. 

The myth crossed the Channel with Whistler— 
too irrepressibly gay as a man to be serious as an 
artist, was London’s verdict; London’s gossip, all of 
his frivolity, his audacities, his impertinences, never 
of his sincerity, earnestness and industry. The truth 
is in his work and, if that did not remain, his letters 
to Fantin would still be a record of his struggles, 
his wrestling with technical problems, his despair, 
his hope, his exultation with success, his agony with 
failure. “Ah! mon cher, comme il a du travailler,” 
was a cry from his heart when he wrote urging 
Fantin to join him at Biarritz for the often pro- 
posed and never accomplished journey to study 
Velasquez at Madrid. He knew what the diligence 
of the master must have been—what the toiling 
always of genius before perfection can be attained. 
Could Ruskin have seen these letters he would have 
marveled at the effort and the study and the scru- 
pulous care that went to flinging a pot of paint in 
the public’s face. Again and again “the coxcomb” 
reproaches himself for that early indifference to 
Ingres from whom, after all, the principles of sound 


D: were to be learned. ‘Again and again he — 
r proaches himself for his devotion to Courbet and 
his preoccupation with ce damné Réalisme. Not 
really that Courbet ever influenced him, he was 
_ sure, he was too personal in his art for that, too 
rich in qualities that were not Courbet’s. Still the 
ery of Nature had appealed to him and he had 
copied her, with the vanity of Pécolier débauché. 
Letter after letter revealed the earnestness of his 
purpose and his method—an astounding series, but 
for Fantin alone. Whistler had not yet begun the 
4 letters intended for the public and the pamphlets 
he later collected together in The Gentle Art of 
Making Enemies—the Bible he called it, and not_ a 
_ without reason. It is the Bible of Art to all who read — a 
with intelligence. ae 
The first public pronouncement that astonished a 
the world by its revelation of the serious Whistler . 


was given at the Trial. His dignity disappointed — ee 
Judge and Counsel who were prepared for a farce, — E 
and the crowd who had come to laugh. One answer — a 
sn his cross-examination has been and is continually _ e 


quoted, and much mangled in the quoting. It was 


led up to by the question of the Attorney-General, a 
~ Counsel for the Defendant: oe! 
“Can you tell me how long it took you to knock yy, 


off that Nocturne? “hi 
Whistler: 1 beg your pardon? (Laughter.) Z 
Attorney-General: 1 am afraid that I am using a 


64 THE ART OF 


term that applies rather perhaps to my own ‘ 
work.... 

“Whistler: Let us say then, how long did I take 
to ‘knock off’-—I think that is it—to knock off 
that Nocturne; well, as well as I remember, about 
a day....I may have still put a few more touches 
to it the next day if the painting were not dry. I 
had better say, then, that I was two days at work 
on it. 

“Attorney-General: The labor of two days then, 
is that for which you ask two hundred guineas? 

“Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge of a 
lifetime.” 

The whole Trial was such a misapprehension, 
such a determination to see farce in the practice of 
art, to Whistler the most serious thin g on this earth, 
examination and cross-examination afforded him 
such a slight opportunity to say all he thought 
should be said, though what he did say made a 
deep impression, that a month after the Trial he 
published the first of his little brown-paper cov- 
ered pamphlets: Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art 
Critics. It is a denunciation not solely of Ruskin, 
but of the whole tribe of critics who do harm and 
not good. Whistler’s words explain his creed more 
eloquently than anybody else could explain it for 
him: 

“Over and over again did the Attorney-General 
cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, ‘what is 


‘qoOaIud VASUALLVA ATO 


ses 


‘ad105D GNV ANd NI ANYNLOON 


haaq{VQ) 940 T, 


Sh 5 - 


ST 


a4 ae Stes m ; ¥ ‘ ‘ vy oer ‘ tee 
nting if the critics withhold their 


lash?” 
a “As well might he ask what is to become of 
_ mathematics under similar circumstances, were they 
possible. I maintain that two and two the mathe- 
‘matician would continue to make four, in spite of f 
_ the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry ae 
_ of the critic for five. We are told that Mr. Ruskin 
‘ has devoted his long life to art, and as a result is 
: ‘Slade Professor’ at Oxford. In the same sentence, 
we have thus his position and its worth. It suffices 
‘not, Messieurs! a life passed among pictures makes 
not a painter—else the policeman in the National 
_ Gallery might assert himself. As well allege that he 
__who lives in a library must needs die a poet. Let 
not Mr. Ruskin flatter himself that mere education 
_ makes the difference between himself and the po- 
 liceman when both stand gazing in the Gallery. ... 
“What a commerce it all is, to be sure! 
“No sham in it either!—no ‘bigod nonsense.’ 
_ They [the critics] are all ‘doing good’—yes, they 
all do good to Art. Poor Art! what a sad state the 
slut is in, and these gentlemen shall help her. The 
artist alone, by the way, is to no purpose, and re- 
_ mains unconsulted; his work is explained and rec- | 
tified without him, by the one who was never in it _ ny ‘2 
—but upon whom God—always good, though 
_ sometimes careless, has thrown away the knowledge 
r used to the author—poor devil! ... ie 
oe rs. 


68 THE ART OF 


“Art is joyously received as a matter of opinion; 
and that it should be based upon laws as rigid and — 
defined as those of the known sciences, is a sup- 
position no longer to be tolerated by modern cul- 
tivation.” 

And then he draws the parallel, exposes the ab- 
surdity: 

“The Observatory at Greenwich under the direc- 
tion of an Apothecary! The College of Physicians 
with Tennyson as President! and we know that 
madness is about. But a school of art with an ac- 
complished littérateur at its head disturbs no one! 
and is actually what the world receives as rational, 
while Ruskin writes for pupils, and Colvin holds 
forth at Cambridge.” 

Whistler was in dead earnest. He was upholding 
the truth he never ceased to maintain, that art is 
a science—the science of the beautiful. Of course 
the critics did not approve of the pamphlet—did 
not follow his argument, did not agree with his 
conclusion. Tom Taylor, Civil Servant and, in his 
leisure moments, art authority of The Times, who 
had been writing nonsense about Velasquez and 
been exposed by Whistler, involved himself still 
further by attempting to prove Whistler wrong. 
Whistler answered with the joyous laugh that al- 
ways convinced the public of his hopeless frivolity, 
in art as in life: 

“Shrive your naughty soul and give up Velas- 


| nment Ve arrears of time and paper, and leave 
engeance to the Lord, who will forgive my ‘gar- 
bling’ Tom Taylor’s writing.” 

Tom Taylor wrote again, a letter Whistler did 
well to preserve in The Gentle Art as a typical 
_ example of the critical treatment to which he was 
_ for long subjected, the reason of his gay but bitter 
_ wit, his relentless persecution of his critics: 

_ “Pardon me, my dear Whistler, for having taken 
you au sérieux even for a moment. 

“JT ought to have remembered that your penning, 
like your painting, belongs to the region of chaff.” 
“Why, my dear old Tom,” was Whistler’s an- 
q swer, “I never was serious with you, even when you 
were among us. Indeed, I killed you quite, as who 
should say, without seriousness, ‘A rat! A rat! you 
_ know, rather cursorily.” 

_ I have quoted liberally from the pamphlet and 
the ensuing correspondence because nothing else 
_ in The Gentle Art, that is, no one incident, shows 
so well the contrast between Whistler serious and 
_ Whistler gay—Whistler refusing to overlook any 
want of respect to art and Whistler exposing with | 
E biting humor the ignorance of an unfortunate 
F = contrast that has not wholly ceased to 


70 THE ART OF > 


profession of faith convincing in its sincerity, a- 
work of art perfect as his portraits and his Noc- — 
turnes. And he was serious in his Propositions, his 
statement of technical truths, the truths that ruled — 
him in his own practice and that are an unfailing ~ 
guide to etchers and painters. To turn to these 
Propositions to-day is to be amazed at their fresh- — 
ness and their vigor. They help to establish his con- 
tention that only the artist is qualified to write of 
art. Propositions and Ten O’Clock survive while 
the outpourings of Hamerton, Tom Taylor and the 
others have quietly passed away. | 
To hear Whistler talk of art with sympathetic 
friends was to be left without a doubt of his pro- 
found seriousness. Because his subjects in London 
and Venice and Paris were usually streets, shops, 
the river and its shipping, and the out-of-the-way 
canal, an old doorway, a crumbling wall in prefer- 
ence to the great monuments of the past, it was 
concluded that for these monuments he had no 
appreciation, no admiration, that he disdained them 
because they were difficult. Whistler always said it 
was an impertinence to reproduce the masterpieces 
of the masters. And, besides, for his purpose he 
sought his own subjects as the masters had sought 
theirs, You could not listen to him when old mas- 
ters and masterpieces were discussed and not be 
convinced of the reverence in which he held them. 
That old story of his comment “Why drag in Ve- 


NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD 


Mrs. S. Untermeyer 


: 


THE FALLING ROCKET, 


5 4tibs 3 em Pa ; =e 3 
uez answer to som ‘ily p person’s silly rOke. 
s been repeated over and over again as an in- 
tance not of his amusement in gulling his critics 
which was what it meant, but of his vanity and 
_ indifference to all art save his own. We wonder 
now how this could have been thought or sug- 
gested of the artist who wrote of the “Master of 
Madrid” as he ‘“‘who towers above all,”” whose brush, 
dipped in light and air ‘“‘made his people live 
_ within their frames, and stand upon their legs, that 
all nobility and sweetness and tenderness and mag- 
nificence should be theirs by right.” 
Art is rare, every man who calls himself an artist 
is not to be accepted. But before the chosen, before 
_ the true masters no one was more sincere in his 
4 homage than Whistler. One of my most memorable 
experiences was of my visit with him to the Na- 
_ tional Gallery just after his wife’s death, when his 
4 grief could not kill his joy in Velasquez and Titian, 


SR fy eee eee 


wife had loved. They helped him forget, as long 
as he was in the Gallery he was absorbed in the 
splendor of the masterpieces on the walls. No two 
painters could be further apart in method and 
_ manner than Tintoretto and Whistler. But he was 
not therefore blind to beauty of strong color and 
a het design. I remember too his interest 
ee Ochtervelt’s s Lady gts at a Spinet was 


above all in Tintoretto’s Milky Way, a painting his 


74 THE ART OF © 


at the Royal Academy in 1902. Ochtervelt was ) 


then all but unknown in London. Whistler had 


gone to the Academy, weak and wretched as he — 


was, especially to see it and the Kingston Lacy Las — 


Meninas, and that evening, dining with us, it 


seemed as if he had taken a new lease of life when — 


he talked about the Ochtervelt and its beauty of 
surface, for “the finish, the delicacy, the elegance” 
of the Dutch masters like Terborch and Vermeer 
enchanted him. I remember his talk of Claude Lor- 
raine, his comparisons between the work of the 
French master, full of knowledge, and the work 
of Turner,” “the old amateur,” and he would take 
Joseph Pennell to the National Gallery and, in front 
of those paintings of Claude and Turner that hang 
there side by side, point out the accomplishment 
in the one and the bungling in the other. It is 
curious how Turner could have made the hanging 
together a condition of his gift, so entirely does 
this arrangement result in his own discomfiture. 
George Sauter was in the Haarlem Gallery with 
Whistler shortly after the illness which was almost 
his end during the summer of 1902 and told us of 
Whistler’s raptures over Franz Hals’ group of old 
women, the painting of the flesh, the quality of 
those wonderful blacks and whites.—‘Oh, what a 
swell he was—can you see it all?—and the charac- 
ter—how he rendered it?” They were alone in the 
place, the Guardian had let them stay on after 


_ This hardly sounds as if Whistler disdained all 
art save his own. The truth is that he disdained no 
art in which there was beauty and, indeed, he could 
not conceive of art without beauty, without dis- 
tinction, without refinement. To him art was a 
_ science, its one and only end to deal in beauty. 
We have got beyond so simple a theory to-day when 
artists’ talk is all of self-expression. I can fancy 
Whistler’s laugh at this talk as if they had suddenly 
made a new discovery and it had not been the de- 
| sire, the irrepressible necessity of the artist to ex- 
fk 


a 


ce ee 


press himself ever since his struggles over his first 
_ decorated pot and first drawings on the walls 
of his cave. The difference is that until the coming 
of the “modernists” the artist believed that this 
expression of himself should be made in terms of 
beauty. Moreover, he believed that his success de- 
pended on his mastery of his tools. Whistler was 
carrying on the only right tradition of art when he 
strove for beauty in his work and knowledge in his 
technique. For the artist who could not express 
himself in terms of art—in,beauty of line, of color, 


_ of tone, of drawing—Whistler would have shown 


*% 


no mercy, seeing clearly that the language of art 


GO ~ ee a ea ie me 


76 THE ART OF 


was for no man who had not mastered these terms, 
however wonderful, or powerful, or ambitious — 
might be the self that sought expression. 

Artists associated with him, under his Presidency, 
either in the Society of British Artists, or in the 
International, would be the first to insist upon 
the seriousness of his aims and methods. Outsiders 
jeered when he presided over the British Artists, 
but that was in the Eighties and was still the fash- 
ion. The International was started towards the end 
of the next decade when the tide had turned, and 
whatever of the old contempt might survive was 
kept decorously out of sight. His aim in each So- 
ciety was, by the dignity of its conduct and its 
exhibitions, to uphold the dignity of art. He worked 
hard to this end with Council and members, in his 
official capacity allowing no familiarity. He was the 
symbol, as it were, of the Society and by his con- 
duct he would make its high standard clear. It was 
a revelation to the many who thought the British 
Artists had chosen a clown to sit in the Presiden- 
tial chair. The few were prepared for both the high 
standard and his determination to maintain it. The 
rank and file of the British Artists, however, much 
preferred comfortable mediocrity and when they 
learned, as they did quickly, that Whistler had no 
intention to encourage it, they rebelled. His position 
became impossible and he resigned, the minority, 
the men of promise and performance, resigning 


MISS ROSA CORDER, 


ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK AND BROWN 
Frick Gallery 


histler faced: “The Artists came out,” he sade 
“and the British remained,” and he congratulated 


had the right man in the wrong place. 

_ By the time the International was founded the 
British had been forced to admit that the clown 
: was an artist after all. He had devoted friends 
_ among the younger men, none more staunch in 
his devotion than Joseph Pennell. The members of 
_ the Glasgow School, Guthrie, Lavery and the others, 
_ had from the beginning looked up to him as master 
: and now accepted him as President. The members 
_ of the New English Art Club, or rather the loyal 
4g among them, gathered about him. He was the 
_ leader of the strongest opposition or secession Lon- 
_ don had ever seen and, had it not been for his ill- 
ness and death when the Society was but a few 
_ years old, the power of the International with the 
_ younger generation would have made it more than 
the rival it had already become to the Royal’ 
4 - Academy, and ceased to be after his death. 

_ His students never disputed his seriousness. The 

scheme of a school in the White House came to 
nothing, thanks to Ruskin. But about the same 
- time that the International was founded in London, 
- the Académie Carmen, with Whistler: as master and 


80 THE ART OF 


as the International suffered, from his illness dur- 
ing his last years. In the winter he was often con- | 
fined to the house, or else he went where the climate 
was kinder and less harsh than in London and 
Paris. His absence led inevitably to disappointment, | 
grumbling and dwindling of numbers, until finally 
in the winter of 1901, which he was spending in 
Corsica, the school was closed. He had had time to 
make his influence felt, to have innumerable stories 
told of him and his visits, and, from beginning 
to end, to impress his sincerity and seriousness upon 
every one connected with the experiment. He was 
there “to teach the surface application of paint and 
brushes” and he required seriousness equal to his 
in all who came to acquire the knowledge he could 
impart. He was to be received as a master, not as a 
good fellow in shirt-sleeves. He had his theories, 
his methods, his principles of technique. And, 
astonishing as it may seem, Whistler, the Idle Ap- 
prentice, supposed to have paid no attention to his 
master, Gleyre, remembered what he learned at 
Gleyre’s, not only in his own painting, but in his 
teaching. Gleyre taught that the color scheme 
should be arranged on the palette before the paint- 
ing was begun on canvas, he insisted that ivory 
black was the base of tone. And so did Whistler 
at the Académie. This was the reason of the little 
verse that went the rounds of the studio: 


I bought a palette just like his, 


His colors and his brush. 
The devil of it is, you see, 
I did not buy his touch. 


Students, accustomed to the ways of other stu- 
_ dios, were mystified by the dignity and decorum 
_ demanded at the Académie Carmen, and it must 
be admitted that many of the innumerable stories 
that came of it are funny. There was the man in 
the men’s class whom Whistler found with a pipe 

in his mouth at the hour of the master’s visit. 

“Really,” said Whistler, “you had better stop paint- 
ing for you might get interested in your work and 
your pipe would go out.” There was the plaintive 
young lady who, when he did not approve of her 
work, thought that he wanted her to paint what 
she saw. “Yes,” he said, ‘‘and the shock will come 
when you see what you paint.” There was the pre- 


you been through college? I suppose you shoot? 
Fish, of course? Go in for football, no doubt? Yes? 
Well, then, I can let you off from painting.” 
However freely stories circulated among the 
students, when he appeared they were as serious 
as their master, sometimes too nervous and fright- 
ened to profit by his visit. He knew how to inspire 
respect. People might misinterpret his “Ha! hat?’ 


But his students could not mistake his seriousness 


Se ont hor MIN 


ay 


tentious amateur whom Whistler asked, “Have 


eal 


+ 
ae 
+ 

pe et 


82 WHISTLER 


as artist and master. And, when they showed they — 
had anything in them, Whistler, by his interest, 
quickly put an end to the first nervousness in his 
presence. 

In fact, the people, young or old, who saw 
Whistler intimately, those who worked with or 
under him, never wavered in their conviction of his 
intense seriousness, his humility before his ““God- 
dess,” his sympathy with all as sincere as himself 
in her service. He was the pretender, the buffoon 
in art solely to the docile public of a highly con- 
ventional age in a country which is the headquar- 
ters of convention. 


THE YELLOW BUSKIN, 
LADY ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL 
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK 


Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia 


pete to 
COPS pe - 


ae 

= “Ke 
 WHISTLER THE ARTIST: HIS PAINTINGS 
= HISTLER used to tell his students that Hf 
a he could teach them how to paint, but ait 
only God Almighty could make artists of them.. 
: He also taught, in and out of the Académie, that e. 
_ the important business of the artist is to carry on a 
tradition, not to undertake self-consciously to be 
original. y 
In his own case God Almighty had interfered. é 
Whistler was an artist and the fact revealed itself —_ 
a in his work from the beginning. What, according fe 
to his own theory, it was his business to do, he did. a 
He had no desire, like the wholesale modern revo- 
 lutionary, to smash our heirloom of masterpieces sae 
and to start out anew like a little child or the sav- _ a 
age in the jungle. He was a man of too great com- a 
mon sense, his love of beauty was too strong a a 
- passion. To him it would have been a crime to at- ip 
tempt to rid ourselves of our heritage from earlier 
_ generations. He studied the work of the past wher- i 
ever and whenever he had the chance. He copied 
it in the Louvre in what is now considered an out- 
_ of-date fashion. Instead of making light of the 
a 85 | x 

ae iy 


86 THE ART OF | 


took from them all they had to give and then, God 
Almighty having made him an artist, developed 
something essentially his own, something that 
stamped him as the rare genius of his or any time. 

His first pictures, done in his Paris student days, 
show him the rival of Stevenson as the “sedulous 
ape.” It has been said of them before, but is worth 
saying again, that they “smell of the Louvre.” The 
Mére Gérard, the Head of the Old Man Smoking, 
his own portrait—W histler in the Big Hat—sug- 
gest hours of humility and intelligent observation 
in that great gallery, many spent before Rembrandt 
—the Rembrandt who has grown with the years 
more somber, more mysterious, deeper in tone. And 
yet, already in these early Whistlers, Arrangements 
in Black before he invented the name, there is 
something of the matured Whistler in the placing 
of the subject on the canvas, the treatment of the 
blacks, the feeling for design unusual in the stu- 
dent who seldom aims higher than to make as exact 
a copy of the model as possible, with what little 
skill he can muster in the drawing and the model- 
ing. The something different in Whistler is devel- 
oped still further in his next painting, At the Piano, 
or The Piano Picture as it was once better known. 


Here, the striving after design, composition, is 


much more evident in the grouping of the two fig- 
ures; in the way Lady Haden’s black gown, as she 


Mie me iP 2A, OF) wd 
% Te Sees 
r y= Py ak: A 
J + es, = 

‘io 

oe 

a, 


4 
knowledge and achievement of the Old Masters, he — 


pon ie: in the use made of the contrast between 
the curves of the gowns and the straight lines of 
the piano, the dado, the picture frames on the 
— wall. Whistler had begun to consider not merely 
the portrait, but the relation of his sitters to the 
canvas they had to fill, the harmony in line and 
color of which they were the motive. To examine 


the picture attentively is to wonder that a student 


should have attained so high a degree of accom- 
plishment and to understand why Courbet was 
4 struck with it in Bonvin’s studio. 

a €ourbet, rejected that very year, 1859, at the 
first International Exhibition, was holding a show 
of his own and issuing his first Manifesto. As long 
as young men study art, there must and will be 
an opposition, and the Prophet of Realism was just 
the painter to be chosen as leader of the new oppo- 
sition by students who had had enough of Roman- 
ticism. Whistler did not see much of Courbet while 
he was studying in Paris. Some one took him once 
to Courbet’s studio and he was deeply impressed, 
saying, as he walked away, “C’est un grand artiste! 
C’est un grand artiste!” But after the Bonvin ex- 
hibition student and master were brought into 
more intimate relations. They were together, Jo 
also of the company, in Brittany, on the coast, in 
| the summer of 1861, when Whistler painted Alone 


88 THE ART OF 


with the Tide, unquestionably under Courbet’s in- 
fluence. The winter of 1861-62 Whistler spent in 
Paris, his studio in the Boulevard des Batignolles, 
Jo posing for The White Girl. Courbet came to see 
them there, Jo’s beautiful red hair a powerful at- 
traction, and in his portraits of her, La Belle Ir- 
landaise and Jo, Femme d’Irlande, he made the 
most of the hair but missed the sad pale beauty of 
the face. As he saw her, she is a curiously buxom 
Jo to have inspired Swinburne’s poem Before the 
Mirror—that, however, was later on—Courbet did 
not go with Whistler and Jo to Biarritz in the sum- 
mer of 1862, but his influence did and is unmis- 
takable in The Blue Wave, also in pictures painted 
in London during this period—The Last of Old 
Westminster, The Music Room. It was the period 
for which Whistler, afterwards writing to Fantin, 
could not find words indignant enough—the period 
when “that damned realism” had him in its grip. 
But under the influence of Courbet, as under the 
influence of the Louvre, Whistler could not efface, 
subordinate himself. In that lovely Music Room, as 
in At the Piano, you find the same arrangement of 
black and white in the tall figure in riding habit 
who fills the center of the canvas and little Annie 
Haden always in white muslin, and again there — 
is the same balance in the curving lines of the 
dresses and straight lines of dado and picture 
frames. And there is besides a tender delicate ren- 


ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK, 
Carnegie Institute 


COPYRIGHT BY THE DETROIT PUBLISHING Co, 


d ori ng 0! it e flowered chintz 

ordination of detail to the painter’s harmony, that 

_ mark already a great advance and foretell his com- 

ing complete emancipation from Courbet and his 

~ discovery that “Nature is very rarely right, to such 
an extent even, that it might almost be said that 
Nature is usually wrong.” Whistler was not content, 
to paint an exact copy of his sitters ‘and the de- 
tails of their dress and surroundings. In his vision 
of beauty, art touched reality with its magic. 
Already, while he was painting in the Boulevard des 
Batignolles, Courbet coming and going, The White 
Girl, Jo as Whistler saw her, when compared to 

_ Courbet’s Jo, Femme d’Irlande, makes it clear that 

he was halfway out of Courbet’s clutches. 

7: From now on, though different problems ab- 
sorbed him at different times, he was always him- 
self, a strong, a distinct individuality in his art, 

shaped and perfected by the study of tradition, 
none the worse for the interval of Realism. An- 
other influence, it is true, was apparent, when he 
first broke away’ from Courbet—the influence of 
Japan. He was one of the group—Manet, Fantin, 


i Baudelaire, the De Goncourts—who learned to 
love the Orient in the little shop of Madame Desoye. 


in the Rue de Rivoli. It was here he first got to 
_. know the blue-and-white, the kakemonos, above 
all the color prints and sketch books of China and 
_ Japan. Here he learned that the story of the beau- 


' 
f 


curtains and a sub- , 


92 THE ART OF 


tiful is broidered with the birds in the fan of — 
Hokusai even as it is hewn in the marbles of the 
Parthenon. He never actually adopted Chinese and 
Japanese methods as he had Courbet’s, but the 
drawings and prints were an inspiration. He loved — 
to have beautiful things about him and he filled 
his Lindsey Road house with the treasures bought 
for a song at Madame Desoye’s. He clothed Jo in 
gorgeous garments, placed her in the midst of pots 
and prints, lacquers and draperies, and painted the 
Lange Leizen, The Gold Screen, The Balcony—as 
“the Japanese Series” these pictures are usually de- 
scribed. But the most important of them all was 
the portrait not of Jo but of Miss Spartali, daughter 
of the Greek Consul in London, a young girl of un- 
usual beauty. Like Jo, she was arrayed for her por- 
trait in Oriental splendor, which well became her 
rich, exotic beauty, and on canvas she was trans- 
formed into La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine. 
The marvel is that the painter inspired by this 
strange beauty could ever have been influenced by 
that older painter who startled Paris with the mat- 
ter-of-fact Bon Jour, Monsieur Courbet. The Japa- 
nese was a passing phase and Whistler worked out 
of it triumphantly in The Little White Girl, a few 
Japanese details introduced because they happened 
to be about in the room where Jo posed, but Jo her- 
self no longer masquerading in clothes that did not 
belong to her, wearing instead her own simple soft 


stands ies the Minot, one arm Pea out- 
stretched on the mantel below it. This was the 
painting that inspired Swinburne. He put into 
beautiful words the beauty that holds one as a 
charm when one chances upon the picture where 
‘it pr hangs now in the National Gallery. 


White rose in red rose-garden 
Is not so white 


_ is the impression Jo gives in her soft white muslin, 
a vivid Japanese fan in the hand that drops at her 
side, rose-tinted azaleas straying against the fall- 
ing folds of the gown. And with Swinburne one 

- feels all that is lovely in the face of this “White 
rose of weary leaf,” in the “bright hair,” in the 
b hand, “‘a fallen rose,” in the “white throat lifted,” 
i _ understanding why during long years she was 

_ Whistler’s constant model and inseparable com- 
- panion. It is not strange that Swinburne’s tribute 
_ touched Whistler deeply. He was designing his 
own frames at the time and he had two verses from 
- the poem written on the one he chose for The Little 
White Girl. The pity is that the frame should long 
since have disappeared. Such a combination of 
P painter and poet is rare. Fortunately, Mr. Will Low 
Possesses a record in an old photograph of the pic- 


= a 


ic. 5 ee 


94 THE ART OF 


ture in its original frame, which he allowed us to 
reproduce in The Life of Whistler. i | 

To his study of Japanese art Whistler owed his 
command of detail, his exquisite dexterity in 
rendering it, and his critics, who say he omitted de- 
tail from his pictures because he could not paint 
it, have only to be referred to his Japanese series 
to discover their mistake. Still more important, he 
also undoubtedly owed to this study, especially of 
Hiroshige’s color prints, the inspiration of his Noc- 
turnes in which, if genius can be said to be more 
original in one thing than in another, Whistler was 
most original. He was the first to paint the night. 
That distinction can be given him without dis- 
pute. Here and there, before his time, artists may 
have attempted to paint things and places seen at 
night, a few entertained a vague ambition to paint 
moonlight. But, before Whistler, not one had en- 
deavored to render on canvas the very quality of 
night, its atmosphere, its color, the depths of its 
darkness, its mystery, its pale dim light from the 
stars and the moon; I might almost say no one had 
ever seen night before. His Nocturnes were scoffed 
at in the beginning, but now people who are caught 
in the blue twilight or the paler starlight and con- 
descend to be conscious of the fact, say “How like 
a Whistler!” 

His desire to paint night was stimulated by his 
knowledge of Hiroshige. This does not mean that 


- 


‘THE MASTER SMITH OF LYME REGIS, Boston Museum 


ne 


he was « r wante ‘to be a copyist, an ec 
shige. The difference in the medium the two men 
used would have made such an echo impossible. 
_ Hiroshige, working in flat tints and lines on his 
- wood-block, suggested night with poetic truth, but 
_ the medium limited him to the suggestion. Whis- | 
tier, using his brush and paint, could render the 
tone, the mystery, the actual truth of night rather 
than its symbol. In the earlier Nocturnes he was 
haunted by certain details in Japanese design, the 7am 
little Butterfly in its panel, or a branch of foliage 
straying across the canvas, was often an essential 
part of the pattern. If he introduced a bridge into 
the composition, as in that perfect Nocturne now 
hanging in the Tate Gallery, Battersea Bridge, he 
placed it on his canvas much as Hiroshige placed 
his bridge on his block. But these details, for all 
their truth and charm, are not indispensable. The 
beauty of night would still fill the canvas if they =e 
were not there and Whistler soon omitted Butterfly 
and spray of foliage altogether. 
The Nocturnes are simple in effect—a space of | 
vague blue water under a space of vague blue sky, 
buildings on the farther shore, sometimes the 
_ bridge high across the canvas, sometimes a ghostly 
sail moving out of the shadows—so that to the 
_ Academically trained public, as to the Judge in 
court, there seemed no work in them whatever. 


The critics of the day were of the same mind as 


es. 


98 | THE ART OF 


Sala who, in our copy of Thornbury’s Legends 
which had been his, wrote ton Esc one of Whis- 
tler’s delicate illustrations: “clever, sketchy and 
incomplete, like everything he has done.” The 
Pre-Raphaelites, though in the opposition, had en- 
couraged the belief that the more a painting or 
drawing revealed the labor of the artist, the more 
sincere and praiseworthy the achievement. Holman 
_ Hunt would boast of the days or weeks he had de- 
voted to one shaving in The Shadow of the Cross. 
But Whistler said, ‘‘a picture is finished when all 
trace to bring about the end has disappeared.” The 
Nocturnes looked simplicity itself, but this sim- 
plicity was not achieved without the closest appli- 
cation and industry. He quickly learned that he 
could not paint night at night. By artificial light 
he could not see what he was doing, the color that 
seemed right would in the morning be all wrong. 
Then he remembered Boisbaudran. He had not 
studied with Boisbaudran, but Fantin and Legros 
had, and they probably initiated him in their mas- 
ter’s methods. Boisbaudran believed the cultivation 
of memory indispensable in an artist’s training 
and he would send his students, by day or night, 
into the streets or the country to visualize what 
they saw, so exhaustively and so accurately that, 
back in the ‘studio, they could put it down as ac- 
curately oni canvas. This was the method Whistler 
finally adopted for the Nocturnes. Evening after 


evening he 
bankment, or sit at his window overlooking the 
*hames in Lindsey Row, and study the river and 
‘the Battersea shore and the sky and the passing 
boats until he had the whole picture by heart. 
‘Usually some one was with him to whom, after he Z 
‘had mastered his lesson, he would repeat it, recall- 
ing the arrangement of color and line and every 
_ detail. If he made any mistake in his recitation he 
_ would turn to his study again and yet again until "i 
his description was faultless. After this he would 
go to bed, absorbed in the subject and immediately 
q in the morning begin to put it on canvas with the a 
large brushes and the very liquid paint he prepared x 
_ for the purpose. If all went well, the Nocturne 
was finished, as he told the Judge in court, in a 
couple of days. 
Night is rarely so beautiful, so mysterious any- | 
_ where as in London, and his windows and the Em- 
_ bankment were. never exhausted. But sometimes a 
_ he wandered on down to Westminster, sometimes ‘ 
- to Cremorne Gardens which gave him The Falling 
 Rocket—the coxcomb’s paint pot—or he left 
~ London for Southampton perhaps, or went as far | 
_as Valparaiso, bringing back two of the loveliest of i 
the series. The upright Valparaiso Bay—Blue and nid 
Gold was the first Nocturne he exhibited, though S 
it may not have been the first he painted. In the 
beginning he called these pictures Moonlights. 


se 


mes ie: vty F 
sl!’ Per fa ss [Pa 
» is v ~ ae 


100 THE ART OF 74, 7 1 


When he changed this to Nocturnes, critics and 
public were outraged as they would most likely not _ 
have been had they known that the title originated 
not with Whistler but with Leyland. When Ley- 
land suggested it, Whistler was enchanted: 

“I can’t thank you too much for the name Noc- 
turne as the title for my Moonlights. You have no 
idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and 
consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so 
charming, and does so practically say all I want to 
say and no more than I wish.” 

In his portraits as well, Whistler was escaping 
from the last touch of Japanese influence and 
Courbet’s. As his knowledge of beauty increased 
he learned these two facts—realism is not the solu- 
tion of the problem of art, color will yield as per- 
fect a design as detail. “As music is the poetry of 
sound,” he wrote, “so is painting the poetry of 
sight, and the subject matter has nothing to do 
with harmony of sound or of color,” which was 
Greek and Latin to the public of his day. Popular 
painters racked their brains and every available 
book of reference for a story or an allegory or an 
historic event to paint and, when they found what 
they sought, they shut themselves up in their 
studios for fear a less fortunate rival might steal 
it. “Art should be independent of all clap-trap— 
should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense 
of eye or ear, without confounding this with emo- 


PORTRAIT OF HIS MOTHER, Ihe Louvre 


2 


tions Cel ie to it, as Pacsotion: pity, sve 
patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of 
concern with it and that is why I insist on calling 
~ my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies’:”’ a little 
paragraph which is the keynote to the ends and 


- Whistler, 2 shameless Pagan to the patrons of the 

_ “painted photograph” and the story-telling pic- 
ES ture, has become to modern authorities a Puritan 
because he concentrated interest on the least human 
and the least living elements in a work of art. 


In the long series of portraits, beginning with 


_ the Mother and Carlyle, the experiments of the 
student are at an end, the knowledge of the master 
triumphs. He let there be no mistake about the 
aims he now set himself. His portraits were 

Arrangements in color, Symphonies, Harmonies, 


Variations. Again the critics raved. When i 


_. Mother—Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1, 
was succeeded by Thomas oe Arrangement 

‘in Gray and Black, No. 2, they deplored his 
_ limited palette and limited stock of ideas. For both 
portraits he chose not merely the same title but the 
same gray wall with the same frames hanging on it, 
the same black dado; in both the figure was seen in 


he 
‘ wall. True, the curtain in the portrait of his 


_ Mother does not reappear in the portrait of Carlyle; 
- the details of costume are necessarily different, 


ah 


as "Oth. 


aims of his life as artist. And the irony of it is that — 


__ profile seated on a cane-bottomed chair against this. 


104 THE ART OF 


though not the color. Of the difference in the 


character of the two sitters—the Mother serene 


and placid, Carlyle weary and impatient—of Whis- 
tler’s profound appreciation of this difference, the 
critics could see nothing. Nor could they appreciate 
the appropriateness of the same composition and 
color scheme for two old people with whom age 
had had its way. 

Carlyle looks so conscious of his martyrdom as 
sitter that it is a comfort to know that something 
in the portrait pleased him. Watts had painted 
him not long before and, after much of what 
Carlyle called ‘meestification,” showed him the 
portrait and asked how he liked it. He looked at 
it. “Mon, I would have ye know I am in the hobit 
of wurin’ clean lunnen,” was his one comment. 
He was satisfied with the “lunnen” Whistler sup- 
plied, and they got on well together though at the 
start it seemed as if there would be trouble. When 
Carlyle came for the first sitting he sat down and 
said, ‘Now, mon, fire away!” Whistler’s face must 
have shown that that wasn’t how he worked, for 
Carlyle quickly added, “If ye’re fighting battles 
or painting pictures, the only thing to do is to 
fire away.” 


The Carlyle was not finished when Whistler 


began his Miss Alexander. It is said that the old 


man and the little girl met at the door one day and 
that when Carlyle heard she had come for a sit- 


ing, h Hensel his fed ed: Eiimured “Puir 


lassie! Puir lassie!” A touch of sullenness in the 
expression of her face in the portrait suggests that 
she was of the same way of thinking, as well she 
might for Whistler required no less than seventy 
| sittings before he had done. This portrait is proof 
_ positive that lack of imagination was not respon- 
sible for his painting two Arrangements in Black 
and Gray in succession. His imagination was in 
divining character and inventing the terms of 
color in which it could be best expressed. He could 
: - discriminate between old age and childhood, and 
for little Miss Alexander the Harmony was in 
_ Gray and Green. He superintended every detail of 
the dress in talks and correspondence with Mrs. 
_ Alexander, going into careful explanation as to the 
_ quality and the laundering of the muslin gown, 
the manner of rosette worn at the waist, the droop 
_ of feather and hat held in the little hand. In this 
_ portrait of childhood he let butterflies flutter above 
the child’s head and daisies blossom on canvas at 
her side. And the little English girl is as lovely as 
the Louvre’s little Infanta by Velasquez. 
The Miss Alexander did not exhaust Whistler’s 
imagination or his resources. Almost all his large 
_full- length portraits belong to those two agitated, 
agitating decades, the Seventies and Eighties, and 
os each portrait the design is as original as the 
stu ay of character is penetrating—Mrs. Huth in 


Li od ead oR? 1 
: . ae = iets Le. 
he Prey te . 
: ; eae | 


106 THE ART OF lira 


severe black velvet and old lace, and Mrs. Leyland 
in soft rose-flushed muslin, a branch of rose-flushed 
almond blossom carrying out the Harmony; Ley- 
land, “the Liverpool Medici,” in frilled shirt and 
buckled shoes, and Irving, a third Arrangement 
in Black but the black relieved by notes and pas- 
sages of silver gray; stately Rosa Corder and Maud 
—Jo’s successor—her face like a delicate flower in 
The Fur Jacket; Lady Archibald Campbell, slim, 
aristocratic, and Lady Meux, buxom, of the people; 
—and these do not complete the list of the portraits 
done in the difficult years of the lawsuit, the bank- 
ruptcy, the struggle with debt, by the artist re- 
proached for doing so little. 

In all, save the Mrs. Leyland, he dispensed with 
superfluous accessories, depending for effect on 
pose, on line, on color, on atmosphere, on the prin- 
ciples he had put into words with surprisingly 
clear brevity. His canvases justified his Proposi- 
tions. His work does not reek of the sweat of his 
brow, his men and women, as he painted them, do 
stand upon their legs and well within the frame. 
This last was to him of supreme importance, . 

“The. frame is, indeed, the window through 
which the painter looks at his model, and nothing 
could be more offensively ihartistic than the brutal 
attempt to thrust the model on the hitherside of thle 
window.” 

And he thought that if in a gallery, with the 


power ‘of comparison it. provided, ‘the people” 
Ffotd’ lock wee 

would look upon their passing fellow creatures 
they might perceive, if dimly, “how little they 


2 


resemble the impudent images on the walls! how 
‘quiet’ in color they are! how ‘gray’ how ‘low in 
tone!’ And then it might be explained to their 
riveted intelligence how they had mistaken mere- 
triciousness for mastery, and by what mean 
methods the imposture had been practiced upon 
them.” But the people did not look, nor did the 
"critics except to seek that which Whistler never 
_ meant them to find. They were mostly like George 
Moore, who was concerned with the big things 
Whistler might have done had he had the physical 
strength to tackle them. It would be as wise to 
criticize Vermeer because he never painted Anat- 
_ omy Lessons and Regent Pictures. 

_ After the Eighties Whistler finished compara- 
tively few large full-length portraits. Early in the 
_ Nineties he was distracted by the move back to 
_ Paris, by his preparation for the Retrospective Ex- 
hibition at Goupil’s in London, which marked the 
turning of the tide in his favor, and, almost 1m- 
mediately afterwards, by the illness and death of 
his wife. He was devoted to her, he was never quite 
the same after she had gone, and the last few years 
of the Nineties he was himself fighting against 
death. Two portraits of Mrs. Charles Whibley— 
P Andalouse and La Tulipe, a full-length of himself 


Pe age 2. 
ie RES eG ROE Ln BU ile ene a 


a -__ = 
We Ln as 
‘ , 
oy 4, 
. . iy 
ix 


110 THE ART OF a 


which was destroyed, a George Vanderbilt, fine at 
one stage but painted out and over to its ruin as I 
last saw it, Miss Kinsella that fared little better— 
these were virtually all the large portraits of note. 
The portraits were usually half-lengths, just the 
head and shoulders, none finer than The Master 
Smith of Lyme Regis and Little Rose, both now in 
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His increasing 
physical weakness did not weaken his faith in the 
principles he had laid down for himself, nor his 
adherence to them in his performance. There was 
no falling off. I often heard him say that in the 
master’s work there could be no better, no worse, 
Art knows no such distinction. 

To these last years belong the beautiful little 
seas painted at Pourville and Dieppe, and one or 
two at Domburg. They are small in size, as are 
almost all his paintings of that period. He had not 
the vigor left to attack large canvases. But they 
are as masterly as the Nocturnes, quiet seas as a 
rule, the movement in the long swell of the waves; 
in a few the water is ruffled and breaks with white 
foam as The Freshening Breeze blows over it. But 
whether the sea was quiet or troubled, in the small- 
est canvas he gave it all its bigness. 

Unlike many painters, he made no secret of his 
methods. “The secret is in doing it,” he maintained, 
and you have only to study those small marines, his 
- water-colors and pastels, to know that his was a 


secret t 0 profound and personal to be shared. The 
lit le pastels he made in Venice are slight simple 
sketches in black chalk on brown paper, here and 
there a touch of color. But try to make one like 
them. Only the other day an artist said to me, 
“They seem so simple,” but look into them, attempt 
to use his method and you discover fast enough 
‘their wonderful subtlety. Borrow, as you hope, 
‘those little touches of color and your difficulties 
; begin. 

_ Iam told that Whistler is out of date in the 
_ studios to-day. The younger men have no use for 
him, which is natural, for the younger men do not 
believe in technical training—the idea that an 
artist should start by mastering his trade is sadly 
_ old-fashioned, But if these younger men would 
spare the time to look attentively into his work, 
_ they might discover its subtlety, the art with which 
_ its simplicity is attained, and, though they might 
shrink from endeavoring to gain his knowledge at 
the cost of the endless training it implies, at least 
their respect for Whistler might be increased. 


at ie | ay 4 
; OF f ; 5 Ait 


poe 


V 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: HIS PRINTS 


HEN Whistler recalled his early years, it 
was over the West Point period he senti- 

mentalized. Time glorified the Military Academy 
in his eyes. It became his standard of conduct. As 
a West Point man he knew just what to do on 
every occasion, just how to face friend and foe. 
In the copy of his Art and Art Critics which he 
sent to the Library he wrote, “From an old cadet 
whose pride it is to remember his West Point days.” 
He could not talk of West Point without revealing 
depths of sentiment of which few suspected him. 
To the months in the Coast Survey, however, 
he owed far more practically than to the years at 
West Point. But memories of his clerkship were not 
tinged with sentiment. To be a clerk in a Govern- 
ment office was to tumble into the matter-of-fact 
after having swaggered as an officer in the United 
States Army. And yet, it was Whistler the clerk 
who obtained the thorough training in the tech- 
nique of etching that enabled Whistler the student 
to produce masterpieces of the art of etching. It 


taught him no more than West Point had taught 
112 


es 


x 


ok 


PORTRAIT OF WHISTLER 


ing res > 


_ technically as an etcher. Those who had never heard 
of his early experience in Washington often mar- 
veled how he acquired such complete technical 
skill so early in his career. Etching in the Eighteen- 
Fifties had not drifted into the popularity it suffers 
to-day when students and artists, untrained and 
q unfitted, turn to it as an easy means of making 
money. It was mostly in the hands of amateurs— 
Seymour Haden in London, the De Goncourts in 
Paris. Meryon is the one professional name of im- 
4 portance that stands out, though there are plates 
1 to the credit of Jacque and Millet and others. The 
student who wanted to etch, and he was the rare 
exception, must have had difficulty in finding a 
master. And here was this young American, with- 
out art training, who knew all about grounding 
and biting his plate and whose command of the 
medium enabled him to draw on copper as freely 
as on paper, in a restaurant or the studio of a friend, 
on a summer holiday with one of the most con- 
firmed fléneurs who ever lived, or in the sedate 
family circle of his sister’s house in London. 


fashion that it attracted him in the beginning. The 
copper plate is more appropriate for a sketch, for 
the record of an impression than canvas and has 
the further value of being easier to carry about. 
e Moreover it was to him a most sympathetic 


him of the art of drawing. But it equipped him 


It was just because he could use etching in this 


Rati i 


Ot ) See ae ae 
ye reat ties ae 
Ko ae et pee fe 


medium, as sympathetic as paint. He was a born 
etcher, as Rembrandt was. Without the Coast Sur- 
vey training he would have etched, but then he 
could not have begun at once. He would have had 
to learn how. As it was, he had learned in the best 
school—a technical school. He had little to unlearn, 
as, to his regret, he had much, or thought he had, 
in painting. 

After less than four years in Paris, The French 
Set—Douze Eaux-Fortes d’aprés Nature—was pub- 
lished and already in the prints of this series he is 
far more personal than in his early paintings, far 
more distinctly original. It is possible to detect the 
Louvre and Courbet in his first work as painter, 
but in Saverne, that precursor of his Nocturnes, 
The Unsafe Tenement, La Marchande de Mou- 
tarde, it is impossible to point to any one save 
Whistler—the serious Whistler whom even Paris 
~ was long in discovering. He no doubt had seen 
Rembrandt’s etchings and appreciated them and 
learned something from them, but already in his 
first prints the line is Whistler’s if reminiscent here 
and there of West Point and the Coast Survey. 
The way of looking at the subject is Whistler’s, the 
design is Whistler’s. Of the gay Whistler, the only 
Whistler according to his fellow British students, 
there is not a hint, not a suggestion, except in the 
title to the Set where he himself figures in the big 
hat Paris and London were never tired of talking 


116 THE ART OF | 


out—the big hat of low crown and wide brim, 
straw because it is summer,—sitting on a sketching 


stool, his plate supported against his knees, a group — 


of children gathered round him, staring with that 

steady half-witted stare that drives less seasoned 
artists back into their studios. Whistler seems im- 
 perturbable, but then the tradition is that it is not 

Whistler who sits there, but Ernest Delannoy who 
put on the big hat, crouched on the stool, drew up 
his knees for an easel, endured the staring children, 
and posed as Whistler for Whistler. 

For these French plates Delatre did most of the 
printing, and he taught Whistler a great deal about 
printing which was not, could not be taught at the 
Coast Survey office. Art is not the special concern 
of printers of official plates. When he was in Lon- 
don doing The Thames Set, as I have said, Serjeant 
Thomas and his son Ralph had Delatre over from 
Paris to print this Series as well, with Whistler, and 
it was really not until the Venice period that Whis- 
tler undertook almost all his own printing himself. 

In London Whistler, at work out of doors, did 
not mind the burden of copper plates any more 
than he had in Paris or on the tramp with Ernest. 
He fell in love at first sight with the Thames, 
the commercial Thames flowing through London, 
looked down upon as unacademic by superior 
_ English critics and artists. When he wanted to 
paint any of the inexhaustible subjects it supplied, 


an) ¢ 


CE Vn ROE ee BIA > ph ae eG f 
a Sane Saye os oy 


river bank. But to get to » know the Thames as oe 
determined to know it, it was best to wander, 
; along the wharves, on the docks, on the low mud aq 
- banks, and during his wanderings it was simpler to _ 
_ carry copper plates for his impressions of the pic- 
_ turesqueness which was ever-changing and to- 
_ morrow might not be as to-day. There were long 
wanderings, from Millbank to Black Lion Wharf, 
_ Limehouse, Billingsgate, Rotherhithe, to the busy 
_ haunts ignored by fastidious Londoners and im- 
- mortalized by Whistler. He saw the Thames, as he | 
__ saw night, that is, as nobody else had ever seen it _ 
before, and all he saw—its shipping, its warehouses, — 


its little inns, its movement, its dock hands, its 

curious riverside types—he drew with a minute- 

_ ness, a feeling for character, a truth, a care, dis- 
turbing to the authorities who had dismissed him _ 
contemptuously and had so often said he could not 
draw that everybody believed it. Everybody in the | 
Sixties would have considered it another rare jest 
could they have foreseen Rodin’s beautiful tribute: _ 
_ “Whistler’s art will lose nothing by the lapse of 
time; it will gain; for one of its qualities is energy, 
another is delicacy; but the greatest of all is its 
mastery of drawing.” The mastery is already in 
_ these Thames plates, with their beautiful render- 


@ it Use as 


— 


THE KITCHEN 


x 


iny of detail their careful observation, there sym- : 

pathetic study. The elaborate working out of detail 
was good discipline from which he gained his later 
freedom, his later knowledge of what to leave out 
as well as what to put in. 


Hanging on our walls in our Buckingham Street 
chambers was Whistler’s Adam and Eve—Old 
Chelsea, to which Joseph Pennell would point as 
the connecting link between the elaboration of 
detail in the Thames etchings and the suggestive- 
ness of the Venice etchings. In the Adam and Eve 
much of the detail is given but it is suggested rather 
than elaborately drawn. In the Venice Series it is 
almost altogether suggested. He gave scarcely any 


outline. He depended more and more for his effects _ 


on different bitings and on the printing. As in 
London, his wanderings in Venice were journeys 
of discovery. He followed no man’s trail but blazed 
a new one for himself. It led him to his Traghetto 
and Riva, Rialto and Nocturne—Palaces, Lagoon 


and Bridge, to so many more subjects than the 


commissioned twelve could include that a second 


Set, of twenty-six,—though not all of Venice— 


_ was issued within a year or two. As he etched now, 


he had to do his own printing. And he had learned 
from experience that, as Joseph Pennell wrote in 


4 The Adventures of an Illustrator: “All artists who 
really etch pull their own proofs, for the printing 
_ of a plate is as vital to its success as drawing or 


ee. 2. ie ne i ae!) Bikes Cisete a calle Li 


Rad to print on that historic old Venice press was 
the hardest of hard labor and dangerous as well, 
_ for sometimes the bed would fall out. One had to 
be on one’s guard. He went on with the printing — 
when he got back to London, chiefly in two rooms _ 
the Fine Art Society rented for him in Air Street, 
within convenient distance of the Gallery. His — 
_ ‘was a new method of working on copper—a more 
_ painter-like method than ever had been attempted 
_ before—and when the prints were exhibited, they 
increased the discomfort of the critics, who were ; 
_ fearful lest in pronouncing judgment they might — 
convict themselves. Those who were least afraid 
ventured to be honest and say boldly what most 
thought, that here was another crop of Whistler’s 
little jokes. | : 
Is it any wonder that Whistler was embittered? 
_ In Venice he had worked at a pace with which few 
_ other artists could keep up. Before the world in 
_ London he was the gay trifler, with the long cane 
__and the ribbon-led Pomeranian dog, but shut away 
from the world he was toiling as hard as a day 
laborer and without a Labor Union’s limit to the 
hours of his day. The plates that came of the toiling — 
os _ in Venice and London were masterpieces, pa si 
stand alone i in the history of etchings Having no 


ha 


TLER 

ment, what could he feel save bitterness when the 
public jeered and joked and treated him as a 

nountebank who, for its amusement, was doing his 

turn on copper? | 

_ Few Sets were sold in London. Ernest Brown of 

the Fine Arts Society brought them to New York. 

‘Eight Se¢s were ordered, that was all. And to-day 

‘none but the millionaire or the speculating dealer 

can afford to buy them when they are up for sale 

in the auction rooms. 

Wherever Whistler might go, etching plates and 

etching needle went with him—that delicate, ex- 

cellently balanced little needle made for Whistler 
by a surgical instrument maker in Paris, now 
copied, but clumsily, and commercially known as 
the Whistler Needle. There were many more Lon- 
don etchings. He never was in Venice again, but 
occasionally he would wander in Belgium, in Hol- 
land, in France, and plates and needle were not 
left behind. When, as President of the British 
- Artists, he attended the Naval Review at the time 
of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, he had with him as 
usual, a number of small plates and his needle, and 
the fine Series of the twelve etchings done in the 
one day are the artistic record of that event. To 
work out-of-doors is something of an ordeal no 
matter where you may be. Begin to paint or draw 
or etch in the street and the crowd gathers with 
the same inane curiosity that draws it irresistibly to 


sie a 


124 THE ART OF 


the spectacle of men digging a hole or laying a gas- 
pipe. From my journeys with Joseph Pennell I 
should say that nowhere can people be so offensive 
to artists as in Holland, the home of art. Whistler 
did not escape when he was there. In the Canals of 
Amsterdam he worked from a boat. Once a woman 
at a window of the high houses emptied buckets 
of filthy water over him, and he had to call the 
police. After that once, he said, he had no further 
trouble, because a policeman always came along 
with him in the boat. In Brussels, in the Grande 
Place, he was hemmed in by the curious but they 
were more easily scattered. He had only to point 
at them with his sharp needle and to shriek the 
“Ha! ha!” so effective in London, and they fled. 
Nothing daunted Whistler when it was a question 
of work. 

And this Idle Apprentice could never be idle. 
If he was not etching in the street or painting in 
the studio, he was drawing, jotting down notes 
on paper. If a chance pose of his model or a sitter 
pleased him, in the intervals of rest, out came paper, 
pencil, chalk or pastels. For a while in the Sixties 
he never went to bed without making a drawing 
of himself. Sitting with us in the evening after 
dinner he would sketch with a handy pen or pencil 
on a bit of paper, hardly conscious of what he was 
doing, the beautiful nude of his last pastel or the 
figure in the painting he had been working on all 


ati ts 


IN THE BIG HAT 


‘ ANNIE HADEN, 


oO f his bee love for the medium, a love shared by 
a Il genuine etchers. Besides, it is hard to say why, 
Ps though it is not strange, the artist is rare who has 
not pleasure in multiplying his work. He who 
creates is too generous to wish to keep his creations 
; for himself alone. The poet is not satisfied until he 
has published his poems. When the artist makes 
“his drawing on paper, there: is one drawing and 
that is all. But when he etches a plate it will give 
_ him twenty-five, fifty, sometimes a hundred good 
prints. After Whistler had been etching for some 
_ years he was introduced to a medium that could 
: multiply still more autographically and still more 
P abundantly than etching. This medium was lithog- 
_ raphy. In etching the biting, a chemical process, 
comes between the artist’s original drawing and 
the printed result. Lithography gives the artist his 
actual drawing unchanged by any process. Lithog- 
raphy i is the multiplication of the original draw- 
ing, etching is the multiplication of the etched 
_ drawing—there is a difference. 
_ Thomas Way, the commercial lithographic 
4 _ printer, was the first to draw Whistler’s attention 
to lithography and help him to understand what 
it can really do. In the Seventies, when Way ap- 
| proached Whistler on the subject, artistic lithog- 
Boh was and had been long under a cloud. Com- 
pec grad pe eptiated and made a hateful thing 


Pe an 
y a A%* 7 
aq 


128 THE ART OF i } 


of it and given it a bad name. Few remembered the 
work of the great lithographers in the great days 
of the art—Géricault and Delacroix, Charlet and 
Raffet, Daumier and Gavarni, Goya and Menzel. 
One of its great advantages was considered a great 
drawback, The stone could yield an almost unlim- 
ited edition, theréfore the dealer’s game of strictly 
limited editions could not be so readily played with 
lithography as with etching. However, Whistler’s 
one interest was to find out what the stone and 
lithographic chalk and lithographic washes and 
lithographic stump would give him. With what 
they gave he was enchanted. To the surprise of the 
Ways his lithographs were perfect from the be- 
ginning. But Thomas Way had come to him in his 
most troubled period, the period of the Peacock 
Room, the Ruskin Trial, the Bankruptcy. After 
these first experiments he was off to Venice where 
his immediate business was to etch. The Eighties 
were for him as troubled as the Seventies, though » 
in another fashion. It was not until the last decade 
of the last century that he continued his experi- 
ments, devoted more time to them, became ab- 
sorbed in lithography as he had hitherto been in 
etching. He did not give up etching but he quickly 
realized that often when he was not prepared to 
etch, it was possible to make lithographs. 

His wife died in 1896 after her long, heart- 
rending illness. During the two or three years of 


this illness, for her sake they traveled from town 
to town and, in London, moved from hotel to 
“hotel. Sometimes he was without a studio, some- 
times he worked in studios lent by friends. Condi- 
tions were uncertain at the best, interruptions 
4 ere incessant. It seemed almost as if lithography 
was invented to rescue him from despair during 
these miserable years. When he had a studio he 
painted. When he was without a studio, etching 
presented difficulties. Copper plates are heavy, hotel 
sitting rooms are hardly convenient or appropriate 
_ for acid baths. To make his lithographs he needed 
simply small sheets of transfer paper and a litho- 
graphic pencil or two. He had given up stone al- 
_ most at the beginning. Stones are heavier than cop- 
_ per plates and Way’s men were not always at hand 
to lug them about for him. He had a little sort of 
case or portfolio made for his sheets of transfer 
paper—his lithographs were always small—and 
~ once his drawing was finished, all he had to do was 
to take or send it to the Ways who transferred 
- it to the stone and printed it, and he never allowed 
them to print many. He limited his editions. 
Bon It chanced that at the same period, lithography 
was approaching the centenary of its invention. 
_ Diligent efforts were made to revive it, not so en- 


< 


. 


_ know, or should know, what fine work came of the 
Me . 


effort. Whistler had anticipated the movement, was 
8 


 thusiastically in London as in Paris, and artists . 


ie e ~ _ 
ee : r F a 


130 THE ART OF 


in no way influenced by this, unfortunately, pass- 
ing mode in the studios. He would have persevered 
in making his lithographs had he been the one artist 
to touch stone or transfer paper, had no collector 
or dealer shown an interest in them. It was the 
medium of all others that provided him with un- 
failing resources during the most grievous troubles 
that he, the man of many troubles, had to live 
through. The little case in his pocket was always 
ready and, absorbed in work, his sadness was re- 
lieved at least for an interval. | 
His many different subjects explain how often 
he turned to it for relief. On his transfer paper 
he drew the little shops and gardens of Paris, the 
streets and smithies of Lyme Regis, the churches 
and the Thames of London, and indoors there were 
friends to pose for him. A sad Whistler he had 
become, almost unrecognizable to those who could 
not imagine any but the gay Whistler. Towards 
the end he stayed at the Savoy in London, where 
the beauty of the Thames he loved was just out of 
his windows. He was but a five minutes’ walk 
from our Buckingham Street chambers and often, 
late in the afternoon, he would drop in, for his 
sadness only increased his unwillingness to stay 
alone. During those afternoons he made the quite 
wonderful series of portraits of Joseph Pennell and 
the one portrait of myself. I think he felt that this 
one was enough. I certainly did. I appreciated the 


AUVHM NOIT AOVTd 


GR tees sa a eaten eats wea 


ed OAR roy 
P= te ny Waven: 


ry OR 


« 


MD 
fui 


th 


honor of sitting for Whistler, but I did not appre- 
ciate the appearance I present in his lithograph. 
BE Nor did he. He had only six prints pulled and on 
the one he sent me he wrote “With sincere apolo- 
a gies,” which I honestly believe I deserved. 
His lithographs are delicate, gray, silvery im- 
pressions of the things and people that interested 
him and seemed appropriate to the medium. They 
are full of character in the rendering of the subject, 
but with little variety in the method used and the 
effects obtained, though lithography allows of in- 
exhaustible variety. The reason is that Whistler 
never knew anything about lithography beyond 
drawing on the transfer paper or the stone. Of 
transferring and printing, he remained in complete 
ignorance. Much mystery then hung about the 
lithographer’s shop. Whistler, I believe, never pene- 
trated as far as the printing presses, never saw his 
drawing transferred or printed. The marvel is that, 
under these circumstances, his lithographs are mas- 
 terpieces. And yet, remembering the technical 
variety in his etchings, one sighs for the things he 
_ might have done had he been his own printer, had. 
he ever been allowed to work with his printer. 


oS be 


pS ae Se S Mts ays Se c a> ae? al ‘ ia 
Sir ov ieee OF at ; fe et oe ae — a pent. 2 ; ge 
be ND oe ee Rl PN Or, I ce Coe A es es oe Silk Se ae a, ara 


revs 


My *. 


IE ee 
Been: Reece te eS emaes  M  NS Sea  nc 


VI 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: HIS WRITING 


HATEVER Whistler undertook to do he 
succeeded in doing astonishingly well. 
When he began to write his pamphlets and Propo- 
sitions and letters to the press it was with the finish 
and distinction of a practiced writer. This was 
partly because always that which his hand found 
to do he did with all his might, partly because 
he was the artist who could not be satisfied with 
the crude, the slipshod or the commonplace. 
People who could appreciate good writing asked 
with amazement how he had managed to develop 
his style. Unquestionably Mrs. Whistler’s stern” 
Biblical discipline was in a large measure respon- 
sible. From the daily morning recital of the Psalms 
and other texts he acquired a knowledge of the 
Scriptures that was of immense service to him 
throughout life. It equipped him from his youth 
with a high literary standard, familiarity with good 
English, and a useful supply of appropriate quota- 
tions. What it meant to him from a religious stand- 
point I would not venture to say. That he cher- 


ished some sort of belief in another world, in a 
134 


_.also in the possibility of communicating with it, 
I know for a fact from the stories he told me of 
__ the wonderful evenings he and Jo spent with 
_ planchette, the forerunner of the present ouija 
board. Another point of view was explained by 
his description of the Bible as “that splendid mine 
of invective.” But what he actually thought of it, 
what manner of Christian it made of him, how far 
it inspired him in his attitude towards life, is an- 
other matter. He seldom talked of religion. The 
one thing certain is that it had a tremendous in- 
fluence on his writing, and there remains The Gen- 
tle Art of Making Enemies as proof. 
| If my knowledge of the Bible was as intimate 
as his, I could no doubt trace to the source in book 
and text many a turn of a sentence, many an illu- 
sion in pamphlets and letters. But I was brought up 
4 in the Church that does not give the Scriptures for 
daily food to babes and sucklings, and I am posi- 
tive only when I come upon something as obvious 
“the crackling of thorns under a pot”’ or “the 
many mansions in my father’s House,” upon char- 
acters as familiar to everybody as Balaam’s ass, or 
ce coquin d’Habacuc. His quotations and references 
of the kind are numerous but anybody can quote 
_ from the Bible, and unfortunately too many do 


ae 
ey ots 


iter, red from the ray si cofied hen a 
arated my skepticism. That his faith in the | 
other world was strong enough for him to believe 


ry 


 : His mother was en with hig? so 
alone when she based his early training on the Bible. 
She could not have imagined, nor would she have 
cared, that thanks to this training he never in litera- 
_ ture had to lament the things to be unlearned. He 
_knew the best from the start. King James’ version 
was his standard, his style was derived from it. 
With such a standard he could not go wrong, — 
though he might be writing nothing more serious — 
than a challenge to “Oscar” for a duel of wit ora 
_ dismissal of ““Arry”—Harry Quilter—destined to 
_ be rescued from the Great Silence by Whistler’s 
ridicule. 
In that first pamphlet, Art and Art Critics, there 
_ was no trace of the amateur. It had point, it had — 
‘vigor, it had humor, it abounded in gay relentless _ 
cruelty to “‘the enemies.” The balance in statement 
and argument was as perfect as the color in his 
Harmonies, the line in his etchings. He wished — 
an unbiased report of his lawsuit to go down to — 
posterity and he knew that he was the one of all's 
‘others to prepare it. He was not writing in his own 
_ defense nor as a defender of Art, which needs none. 
His object was to expose the empty pretensions of ‘ 
‘ the critics who would take Art under their pro-— 
tection and play the guide to artists. He might i 
“not have written at all had it not been for Ruskin’ a 


ee es 2 ee es eee 


WEARY 


ae Fares 


a representative eh the whole tribe of art critics ot 
in their ignorance, would make and unmake the 
reputation of artists with a public as ignorant. The 
_ tribe has not disappeared; in their self-sufficiency, 
_ they continue to pose as patrons and authorities, 
- though with less reason than Ruskin, who had 
studied the rudiments of art and could draw with 
delicacy and charm. Whistler’s summing up is a 
_ fine example of the force, directness and thy 
of his prose: 

“Still, quite alone, stands Ruskin, whose writing 
is art, and whose art is unworthy his writing. To 
him and his example do we owe the outrage of 
proffered assistance from the unscientific—the med- 
dling of the immodest—the intrusion of the gar- 
~ rulous. Art, that for ages has hewn its own history 

in marble, and written its own comments on can- 

vas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and 
wait for wisdom from the passer-by?—for guidance 
from the hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? 
- Out upon the shallow conceit! What greater sar- 


he preaches to young men what he cannot perform! 
_ Why, unsatisfied with his own conscious power, 
should he choose to become the type of incompe- 


never done! 
“Let him resign his present professorship, to fill 


 casm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that 


e: tence by talking for forty years of what he has 


140 THE ART OF cae 


the Chair of Ethics at the University. As master 
of English literature, he has a right to his laurels, 
while, as the popularizer of pictures he remains the 
Peter Parley of painting.” 

I have often thought, as did Joseph Pennell, 
that had Whistler seen Ruskin’s drawings he might 
not have swept Ruskin’s right to criticize so ruth- 
lessly away. Certainly, he granted Ruskin his liter- 
ary laurels graciously enough. He was ever the first 
to recognize and extol good work in any medium. 
He would not have had much sympathy with Rus- 
kin’s method of drawing but he would have ad- 
mitted its honesty. However that may be, this pas- 
sage is as complete and powerful and unanswerable 
a denunciation of the art critic who is not an artist 
as was ever written, true to-day as it was yesterday, 
as it will be to-morrow. 

Had this been Whistler’s sole publication all I 
have said of him as writer would call for no modi- 
fication. It may be that he sprinkled French words 
and quotations overliberally. That he should sprin- 
kle them was natural, inevitable. He spoke French 
as well as English and to many of the delicate 
little things he wished to say, delicate little stabs 
he wished to give, French is more eloquently 
adapted, and to that end he used it often and with 
unfailing effect. But in Art and Art Critics the 
sprinkling is almost overdone. The pamphlet also 
loses by comparison with his Ten O’Clock, but ten 


4 praca: in the erate letters to the papers, 


ne series issued as The Piker Papers, and the first 


set of Propositions. Practice hardly accounts for the 


perfection of style he had developed when he made 
his profession of faith, first from the lecture plat- 


a 


form and then in print. Read Ten O’Clock for 
this profession, the artist’s creed; read it again for 
sheer pleasure in the beauty of the written word. 
Quotation does it scant justice but, as a reminder 
of its rare quality, I must quote once more the 
often quoted passage in which Whistler is supreme 
as artist and writer: 

“And when the everiing mist clothes the riverside 
with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings 
lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chim- 
neys become campanili, and the warehouses are 
palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in 
the heavens, and fairyland is before us—then the 
wayfarer hastens home; the workingman and the 
cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleas- 
ure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to 


see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, 
sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son 


and her master—her son in that he loves her, her 
master in that he knows her.” 
Whistler had no patience with “genius work.” 


He worked hard to reach perfection in his paint- 


ings and prints, and so he worked hard to reach 


142 THE ART OF — 


perfection in his writing. As he got the subject — 
by heart before he painted his Nocturnes, so he got 
his Ten O’Clock by heart before he carried it to 
the platform. Again he went through a fever of 
study, of recitation to his friends, of inventing and 
correcting. Much talk of the “mot juste” was cur- 
rent in the Nineties and is now among the present 
chroniclers at second-hand of that decade. But by 
none of the great little men of the Nineties was 
the “right word” so carefully considered, so weighed 
in the balance, as by Whistler in the Eighties, The 
King James’ translators of the Scriptures had found 
it always and so would he, at the price of no matter 
how many struggles, no matter what agony of 
spirit. He would descend upon one friend at dinner 
to read him a new page, he would rouse another at 
midnight to submit a new paragraph. About his 
theme he never had a moment’s doubt or hesitation. 
London was living in a fool’s paradise of art where 
every duffer, who dabbled with paint or acid and 
could write R.A. after his name, was a born genius. 
It was the great period of the Academy, therefore 
a great art period, even as the Age of Pericles in 
Greece, the Age of the Renaissance in Italy. 
Whistler shattered this comfortable confidence in 
Academic infallibility. There was no artistic period, 
never an art-loving nation—art happens, he pro- 
claimed, a disconcerting truth to the faithful who 
thronged the Burlington House Exhibitions, as it 


OLLAHOVUL AHL 


ne er a em RO ARR RI LR SIT = 


ce a teen ee ny Sr nee ere ee etn —* 


: “fil cage ae eich masterpieces and America 


lone produces “‘fifty best etchings” in a year. For 


ss the benefit of the unbelievers he sketched rapidly, 


‘ im brilliantly the history of Art’s happening, from 


@ the beginning when men went forth each day to 
battle, to hunt, to dig, but one among them “‘dif- 


9 fering from the rest . . . stayed by the tents with the 


- women, and traced strange devices with a burnt 


stick upon a ‘gourd’ ”; 
until — 

**.,. the sunny morning, when, with her glorious 
Greek relenting, she [Art] yielded up the secret of 
repeated line, as, with his hand in hers, together 
they marked in marble, the measured rhyme of 
lovely limb and draperies flowing in unison, to the 
day, when she dipped the Spaniard’s brush in light 


and air...ages had gone by and few had been» 


her choice. 

“We have then but to wait—until, with the mark 
of the Gods upon him—there come among us again 
the chosen—who shall continue what has gone be- 
fore. Satisfied that, even were he never to appear, 
the story of the beautiful is already complete— 
hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon—and broid- 
ered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai— 
at the foot of Fusiyama.” 


Probably no audience was ever so puzzled as _ 


oS CO es on ie VO ee ee 
¥ PN, Be a ae ee ee 


146 THE ART OF Pe Sone 


¥ 


Whistler’s at Prince’s Hall in London on the eve- 
ning of February 20, 1885. The name of the 
lecture startled them—was it deliberate eccentric- 
ity?—though Whistler meant nothing more star- 
tling than to name an hour which would allow 
people the luxury of finishing their dinner to the 
last drop of coffee and the last cigarette, without 
haste and yet arrive in time for their arrival not 
to be a nuisance to him. They were more puzzled 
by his seriousness—sure that the sardonic ‘‘Ha! ha!” 
must suddenly echo through that polite meeting 
place, transform it into a circus, and turn them 
into ridicule for coming, for being there. News- 
paper men decided to be on the safe side and, as if 
the “Ha! ha!” was really ringing in their ears, 
reported the general feeling of the audience to be 
wonder as to whether “the eccentric artist was 
going to sketch, to pose, to sing or to rhapsodize,” 
and then astonishment that the ‘amiable eccentric 
appeared as a jaunty, unabashed, composed and 
self-satisfied gentleman, armed with an opera hat 
and an eyeglass.” Oscar Wilde was afraid not to 
hedge and he carried off the hedging with allitera- 
tion, describing Whistler as ‘a miniature Mephis- 
topheles mocking the majority.” An exception here 
and there in the audience may have realized the 
privilege of listening to the most sincereand beau- 
tiful profession of faith ever made by an artist 
to an unworthy public. But the many sneered or 


- Tt was the serious Whistler, who wrote Ten 
~O’Clock. Art was the subject, on his part there 
was no jesting, and it is worth noting that that 
_ evening in Prince’s Hall his earnestness produced 
a sort of stage-fright, the only time he was ever 
accused of shyness. 
The gay, joyous Whistler dealt afterwards with 
E the critics, their stupidity a goad to his wit. Oscar 
- Wilde was the scapegoat, Oscar who in the Eighties 
a _ posed flamboyantly as the infallible Apostle of Art, 
the one and only wit of the day. Whistler did not 
spare him. Oscar was offensive in The Pall Mall 
_ Gazette. Whistler laughed lightly in The World: 
“what has Oscar in common with Art? ex- 
cept that he dines at our tables and picks from our 
platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in 
the provinces. Oscar—the amiable, irresponsible, 


_ esurient Oscar—with no more sense of a picture 


_ than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opin- 
ions... of others!” 

_ The next week in the same paper came Oscar’s 
thrust: _ 

“Atlas, this is very sad! With our James vul- 
@ _ garity begins at home and should be allowed to 
a there.” 

_ Another week, and then the joyful laugh from 
“Whistler: 


at tee 


+ 
> aN 
yt ae 


ies was 5 still ne iouates ? 


your Own OR eae Co Shea ehes 
Edmund ites, the editor of The World, signed 

himself Atlas and was addressed as Atlas by > hid 
correspondents whom, if as prominent as Whistler 
or Oscar Wilde, he encouraged. He delighted in 
Whistler’s wit and agility in an argument, and 
would sometimes spur him on when he had been 
overlong silent, always ready to print what he 
wrote, to make the Butterfly a “feature.” The cor- 
respondence is in The Gentle Art, the book in 
which Whistler gathered together as much of his 
correspondence as he wished to preserve, and dedi- 
cated “To the Rare Few, who, early in Life, have 
rid themselves of the Friendship of the Many.” He 
and Yates understood each other and, if they did 
not always agree, met the situation with a sense 
of the fun in their disagreeing. Atlas once published 
a letter from Whistler to Oscar Wilde, in it a 
reference to Sidney Colvin, Slade Professor, and 
with a sudden access of politeness or caution printed 
not his full name, but his initials. In another editor 
Whistler might have resented this tampering. But 
to tas he wrote—and Atlas published it: 

-.. How unlike me! Instead of the frank reck- 
lessness which has unfortunately become a char- 
acteristic, I am, for the first time, disguised in 
careful timidity, and discharge my insinuating 
initials from the ambush of innuendo, i 


> 
J 
g 
k 


ADAM AND EVE—OLD CHELSEA 


Peete may I not call a Slade Professor Sidney 
Colvin?” 

_ Below the Butterfly writhes uproariously, its tail 
curling with well-aimed sting in mocking glee. 
And you turn one page and you find the first 
Propositions Whistler issued. The Butterfly draws 
In its sting and Whistler is seriousness itself. This 
; Ge aat throughout the book between the two 
-Whistlers lends the value of biography to The 
Gentle Art. 

At intervals two other sets of Propositions ap- 
_ peared and all three are difficult to quote from be- 
_ cause, in each, one clause depends so entirely upon 
_ another. Etching is the subject of the first and the 
q argument is to prove “that in Art it is criminal to 
go beyond the means used in its exercise,” which 
explains why, to Whistler, the large plate was an 
- “offense,” the triumph of the “duffer.” In Propo- 
_ sitions—No. 2 the truth established is that ‘a pic- 
ture is finished when all trace of the means used 
to bring about the end has disappeared.” For, is 
the conclusion: 

e “The masterpiece should appear as the flower to 
i the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom— 
with no reason to explain its presence—no mission 
to fulfill—a joy to the artist—a delusion to the 
philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an acci- 


My dear A Atla > BE hc not Mes reall a Pete 5 Sas 


ee et ™3 


oy Sys eo Se Sy ee 
; ; y 


152 THE ART OF 


dent of sentiment and alliteration to the literary 
man.” 

To A Further Proposition I have already referred. 
its theme is the treatment of flesh and the mis- 
take of the “unsuspecting painter in making his 
man stand out from the frame.” “The Master from 
Madrid, himself, beside this monster success of 
mediocrity, would be looked upon as mild: ‘beau 
bien sire, mais pas dans le mouvement,’ ” If to the 
Propositions, The Red Rag is added, that lucid ex- 
planation of Arrangements and Harmonies as 
titles for his pictures, you have the very bones and 
sinews of his technical practice and teaching. In 
the Académie Carmen a copy of Propositions— 
No. 2 hung upon the walls. 

On the whole, to the serious rather than to the 
joyous Whistler The Gentle Art is the monument. 
The letters might be left out and, though a pity 
to lose them, The Action, Ten O’Clock, Art and 
Art Critics, the Propositions, The Red Rag would 
more than make up for their loss. To the world 
and to art Whistler the Artist is of more importance 
than Whistler the Man. For this reason I would also 
include with the writing to be preserved at all 
hazards at least one letter—his amazing letter to 
Swinburne, replete with not only his seriousness 
but his sensitiveness, his tenderness, his sorrow for 
the blow dealt by a fellow artist—an artist in 
words. The critic he could throw into the gutter, 


as he direw sya avon But 
aie Pi ected by a poet—and he the 
t who had translated into his medium the strange 
loveliness of The Little White Girl—was too cruel 
a wound for Whistler to pretend to make light 
of it. In The Fortnightly Review (June, 1888) 
‘Swinburne wrote an article on Ten O’Clock. All 
the foolish jibes of the critics reappeared in it, 
all the old foolish names were called—jester, tum- 
bler, clown, dotard, dunce, with, here and there, 
a compliment, a condescending recognition grudg- 
‘ingly granted. But the tendency of the article to 
tidicule, to expose the “gospel of the grin,” there 
was no mistaking, and Whistler was hurt to the 
quick: 

_ “Why, O brother!” he wrote, ‘did you not con- 
sult with me before printing, in the face of a 
tibald world, that you also misunderstood, and are 
capable of saying so, with vehemence and repeti- 

ion. 


e e e e s s e 


“Cannot the man who wrote Atalanta—and the 
Ballads beautiful—can he not be content to spend 
his life with his work, which should be his love,— 
aad has for him no misleading doubt and darkness 
—that he should so stray about blindly in his 
brother’ s flower-beds and bruise himself! 


‘i N .. 
“Who are you, deserting your Muse, that you 


Sg 


154 THE ART OF | | ' 
should insult my Goddess with familiarity, and thee | 
manners of approach common to the reasoners in 
the market place. . 

“Do we not nal the same language? Are we 
strangers, then, or, in our Father’s house, are there — 
so many mansions that you lose your way, my 
brother, and cannot recognize your kin? 

“You have been misled—you have mistaken the 
pale demeanor and joined hands for an outward 
and visible sign of an inward and spiritual earnest- 
ness. For you, these are the serious ones, and, for 
them, you others are the serious matter! Their joke 
is their work. For me—why should I refuse myself 
the grim joy of this grotesque tragedy—and, with 
them now, you all are my joke!” 

To be sure, he gave Swinburne in The World 
a sharp Butterfly sting that probably tingled and 
smarted. The title is Freeing a Last Friend, and it 
winds up, “Thank you, my dear! I have lost a 
confrére, but then, I have gained an acquaintance © 
—one Algernon Swinburne—‘outsider’-—Putney.” 
For Swinburne was by this time under the grand- 
motherly charge of Watts-Dunton, living a sober 
life at The Pines in suburban Putney. Of the two, 
this letter has doubtless been the oftener read. But 
the first—Et tu, Brute!—is a genuine cry from the 
real Whistler, from the artist up in arms when the 
dignity of art was attacked. 


+ > i pale 


FANNY LEYLAND 


Riis ik Scie: book, ee report of the Eden Trial: 
The Baronet and the Butterfly. It has the interest 


of everything that concerns Whistler, though not. 
the brilliancy and wit of The Gentle Art. The rea- 


_ son for this Trial perhaps is not forgotten. But the 
; world forgets quickly and I had better state it in 
7 _a few words, as a reminder, Whistler had painted 


Lady Eden’s portrait, arranging through George 


_ Moore that the price was to be from one hundred 
to one hundred and fifty pounds for a sketch in 
_ pastel or water-color. Lady Eden was beautiful, a 
sitter to his taste, and he painted a small half- 
length in oils. When it was finished Sir William 
Eden chose the fourteenth of February as date of 
payment and, in the studio, presented Whistler 
with a “Valentine” in an envelope. When Whistler 
opened the envelope he found a check for the low- 
est sum mentioned, one hundred, and it was in 
_ pounds, not in guineas. He thought, rightly, that 
_ it was for him to decide upon the price and he 
could no more forgive Sir William Eden for the 
pounds instead of guineas than Leyland in the old 
— quarrel over the Peacock Room. He kept—to make 
sure of bringing things to a crisis, he deposited— 
‘ the check, he refused to give up the painting. Sir 
_ William sued him in the French Courts, for this 
_ happened when Whistler was living in Paris. In 
_ the Civil Tribunal Whistler lost. He took the case 


158 THE ART OF ye 1 
to the Cour de Cassation and won. He was allowed 
to keep the painting which, for him, was all that 
counted. He had to pay back the hundred pounds 
as he had meant to. Also, he had to pay the costs 
of the first Trial, but Sir William Eden had to pay 
the costs of the Appeal. Out of these proceedings 
Whistler made his book. Except for the comments 
on the margin and the prodigious antics of the 
Butterfly, there is little Whistler in it, and lawyers’ 
_ pleadings are not often amusing reading. I thought 
his reports to us in his letters not only more read- 
able but more illuminating. In these he explained 
that he had proved the right of an artist to his own 
work, added a new clause to the Code Napoléon 
and, incidentally “wiped up the floor” with the 
Baronet, while all Paris looked on. And the news 
of it must be spread. i 
“Take my word for it,” was the way he put it 
to Joseph Pennell, “the first duty of a good general 
when he has won his battle is to say so, otherwise 
the people, always dull—the Briton especially— 
fail to understand, and it is an unsettled point in 
history forever. Victory is not complete until the 
wounded are looked after and the dead counted.” 
To his private correspondence he gave no less 
care than to his books and his letters for the public, 
The hope is that some day this correspondence may 
be published. The letter might be to a friend or on 
business, but he could not let it go with a slovenly 


4 Bree made corrections in the original, he wished 
_ to have a fair copy to send. And my memory is as 
a Evivid of his pains in addressing the envelope to 
mM. , Maitre Bottier.”’ His letters were as beau- 


tiful to look at as they were stimulating to read. 
_ They were designed as well as written. I emphasize 4 


the point because, until they are published, the new 
generation cannot quite realize how essentially he 


was the artist in little things as in great, his sense — 


‘of beauty so keen that he could never be satisfied 
with anything short of perfection. Unless this fact 
is recognized Whistler must remain an enigma to 
the ordinary man. I have heard contemptuous 
words poured upon him, by an artist who should 
have known better, because, before going into a 
dinner or a reception, he would look in the glass, 


give a touch to his hair, to his ribbon of a necktie— 


another scandal—to the set of his coat. I often saw 
him do this in our place before going into the room 
where he was to preside at an International meet- 


ing. But I watched him with admiration, knowing 
it was not vanity on his part but that unquench- 
able striving after perfection, in himself as in his — 


art, in everything that belonged to him. 


"sentence ora Psvenly ; page. 2 ies a aid memory : 
of the day he asked me to dictate to him a letter | 
he had written to his shoemaker in Paris, because, 


"SCR et oe ea 


VII 
WHISTLER THE ARTIST: HIS WIT 


OR long in London Whistler’s fame was 
greater as a wit than as an artist, not that 
people understood his wit better than his art but 
they imagined they did. When a man says some- 
thing witty the point may be missed, as it often 
was in Whistler’s case, but laughter is appropriate 
according to the rules of the game. When Whistler 
painted a picture those who laughed loudest could 
not have been so sure that laughter was the correct 
tribute. 

The wonder is that his wit was accepted even on 
trust, so fundamentally unlike was it to the kind 
familiar to his public. It was keen, light, sharp, 
swift. Critics fell upon him with bludgeons of 
stupidity and he parried their blows with graceful 
rapier-like thrusts to which they were unaccus- 
tomed. But if his weapon was delicate, it could 
be cruel and he would not have had it otherwise. 
It could wound and he was far from unwilling 
that it should. Not until “the enemies” were cruel 
beyond endurance did he begin to use his wit in 


self-defense. The witticisms so often repeated, of 
160 


FIRELIGHT, JOSEPH PENNELL, NO. I 


4 


paar ae his 1 newspaper to fill, mone to the 


years when it had become the fashion to look 
down upon him as a jester and upon his art as a 


_ jest. He was never cruel during the gay years in 


- Paris, never cruel during those early years in Lon- 
don before his gayety had been embittered. His 
fun at first bubbled up without a shadow to its 
_joyousness. In those days he had no desire to wound. 
He preferred to laugh with rather than at people. 
-T have already recalled his comment when Rossetti 
_ showed him the picture and read him the sonnet 
_ inspired by the same subject: “Why not frame the 
sonnet?” But this was no doubt not intended 
_ to be unkind. His affection for Rossetti was genu- 
ine. More probably it Was too spontaneous a criti- 
" cism to be suppressed, spontaneity being the very 
essence of his wit, though the last quality it was 
given credit for. 
Most people think that if an artist can paint 
or draw or carve, other accomplishments are super- 
~ fluous. Book learning and political opinions are 
not supposed to come his way; wit and humor are 
_ unwarranted distractions from his appointed task 
in life. It was the habit of Whistler’s contempo- 
_raries to treat art with portentous solemnity. Be- 
cause he had other accomplishments, they refused 
to see good or greatness in his paintings. As they 
i ould 1 not geny his wit, they tried to explain it 


Aa Pc ra” a ee eee 
rca aoe 
.. 


away by saying he prepared his witticisms labori- 
ously and led up to them ingeniously when in any 
company he was determined to impress, electrify 
or insult. Nothing could be more unlike Whistler. 
His wit was part of his joy in living, his contribu- 
tion to the gayety of nations; he would have dis- 
dained it had he been compelled to force it out with 
hammer and tongs. Harper Pennington, when he 
wrote out his impressions for Joseph Pennell and 
myself, said that only once did he see Whistler 
“stumped for a reply.” It was no wonder he was 
then, for Lady Meux, posing in her sables, told 
him to “keep a civil tongue in that head of yours, 
or I will have in some one to finish those portraits 
you have made of me.” What ready answer could 
have been forthcoming to that sort of Billings- 
gate? We never “saw” him “stumped” once, while 
we did see him on the most difficult occasion pos- 
sible readier with his answer than was exactly ap- 
preciated by his opponent. 

He had come as a witness on our side in the 
lawsuit which Joseph Pennell brought against The 
Saturday Review. It had published an article on 
Lithography in which a reviewer suggested that 
lithographs as Joseph Pennell made them on trans- 
fer paper were not lithographs, and that to ask the 
same price for them as for lithographs made on 
stone was to mislead the public as to their com- 
mercial value. The lithographer does not have to 


164 THE ART OF 


as red of technical understanding, will believe 
most thirgs it reads about art in a paper sup- 
posed to be authoritative. The statement affected 
Whistler as seriously for, with a few exceptions, his 
lithographs were all done on transfer paper. In the 
course of cross-examination reference was made 
‘to Mr. Walter Sickert, who wrote the article, and 
Whistler described oe as “‘an insignificant and 
‘ ‘irresponsible person.” 

_ “Then,” said the Counsel for the other side, “Mr. 
Sickert is an insignificant and irresponsible person 
who can do no harm.” 

4 To which, in a flash, Whistler: ‘Even a fool can 
do harm.” 

_ Again, later on in the cross-examination, when 
it was hinted that he was helping to pay our costs 
_and our Counsel, to put this straight, asked him if 
there was ‘“‘any foundation for the question?” 
“Only the lightness and delicacy of the Counsel’s 
ppaszestion, > said Whistler. 

_ Those answers show his swiftness in finding the 
Biche, the cutting, the witty answer in the witness 
“box, the hardest of hard places to be swift and 
witty in. Whatever Whistler’s wit lacked, it was 
_never spontaneity. 

I recall lighter occasions when his readiness 
se served him as well. I was dining with Heinemann, 


foe a able. hoor : 


My 


a Li. » ae ee | aie da ae oye 


% 
og 
’ 


166 THE ART OF . 
much depreciation with which Whistler was wholly 
out of sympathy. At last, some one objected to the 
manners of the French because they were all on 
the surface. “Well, you know, a very good place 
to have them!” was Whistler’s comment. Another 
evening, during the Boer War, which furnished him 
with innumerable opportunities at the expense of 
the British, some one told him the latest news was 
that Buller had “retired” without losing a man, or 
a flag, or a cannon, “Yes, or a: minute,” Whistler 
added. I remember his answer when I asked how 
he liked that wonderful portrait Boldini painted of 
him, “Well, they say that looks like me but I hope 
I don’t look like that,” and his telling somebody at 
our dinner table of his sitters who gradually began 
to look like his portraits of them. For the answer, 
the comment, the criticism, there was no waiting. 
He was always ready, never required time to think 
it out, to prepare it. 

His encounters with Oscar Wilde have passed 
into history. He and Wilde were the two most 
conspicuous figures in the social London of the 
Eighties. They were often compared as wits but 
there was no comparison. Oscar was witty but his 
wit seems more labored, more carefully worked 
out and he could borrow and adapt from others 
when at a loss. That is the explanation of the often- 
told story: Oscar’s “I wish I had said that, Whis- 
tler,” and Whistler’s “You will, Oscar, you will.” 


(42104777) ENANLION 


W ilde, ee ee ial fancied he really Tee 
something about art. Wilde was clever, but of art 
his knowledge was, as the lady thought the man- 
ners of the French—on the surface. He had grown 
up under influences Whistler least respected. He 
had taken part in that extraordinary Oxford move- 
ment, had made roads under Ruskin, who encour- 
aged road-making somehow for the good of art; he 
had steeped himself in the traditions of Pre-Rapha- 
“elitism, had come in at the tail end of the craze for 
Blue China and fancied himself apostle of all it 
_ symbolized. An author and a wit, it has been said, 
should have a separate costume, a particular cloth 
-—Whistler did not quite believe this, he dressed at 
first to please himself and afterwards, discovering 
_ the shock it gave, to annoy a conventional public. 
Wilde flaunted his knee breeches and velvet jacket 
_and long hair as a sign of esthetic salvation. This was 
the reason for Whistler’s Just Indignation in The 
Gentle Art. Oscar had invented new sacramental 
garments and displayed himself in a Polish cap 
_and a much befrogged, much befurred green over- 
coat: 
~ “QOscar—How dare you! What means this dis- 
guise! 
“Restore those things to Nathan’s and never 
? ain let me find you masquerading the streets of 


: and Mr. ‘Manealinit”™ SAS? . 
To Whistler, Wilde’s pose was : piecretad and 
a Precis dions in connection with art, Whistler could 
not stand. The friendship did not last. When it 
came to an end Whistler was merciless. He never 
lost an opportunity to challenge Oscar, and their 
- duel of wit was one of the most amusing incidental 
in Edmund Yates’ World. Their letters scattered 
the “choice venom” of this wit through its pages 
and were never unwelcome to Atlas who, it must 
be said for him, was a confirmed enemy to dullness. 
| Oscar, in Exeter at the time, wired to Whistler : 
after reading a skit in Punch: “Punch too ridicu- 
lous—when you and I are together we never talk : 
about anything except ourselves.” a af 
Whistler wired back: “No, no, Oscar, you fora é 
get—when you and J. are together, we never walle 
about anything except me.” 
And Atlas rejoiced in recording the clash of 
arms. if : 
Oscar sometimes showed Whistler that truest 
form of flattery by appropriating his opinions and ° ‘ 
statements. But when, to save his respect, he backed — 
- himself by: the earlier plagiarist who said “I take b, 
. my good there where I find it,” “Excellent,” 
Whistler thought, but Oscar could go further ail 
boast, H take his good there where I find it.” el : 


ine 


a 


taf ts 
gage 


ie person.” The Butterfly fairly danced over his dis- 


play of temper, its tail curling up with wicked. 
rapture. “I am awe-stricken and tremble,” Whis- 


tler wrote, “for truly the rage of the sheep is 


__ terrible.” And he gave another telling thrust when 


Oscar, talking at the Club of the Academy Stu- 
dents, had gone forth, Whistler wrote, ‘on that 
occasion as my St. John—but, forgetting that 
humility should be his chief characteristic and un- 
able to withstand the unaccustomed respect with 
which his utterances were received, he not only 
trifled with my shoe, but bolted with the latchet!” 

It was not all fun on Whistler’s part; there was, 
as always, the laugh for the world. But he never 
forgave and Oscar, roused, could be insulting. 
Neither could Whistler forget. I remember years 
afterwards when Oscar was in Reading Gaol and 
the few among his old friends still with the cour- 
age to call themselves friends, started a petition 
to shorten the length of his term, Robert Ross— 
that friend of friends—asked me to intercede with 
Whistler and beg him to sign the petition—his 
name would carry such weight. Whistler refused. 
He would not pass himself off as the friend he was 
not, nor pretend compassion for the man who 
fared only as he deserved. 


i answer was - amazingly dignified, holding 
Whistler up to scorn as “‘an ill-bred and ignorant 


_ Some pages in The Gentle Art may have lost 


_ quence. All the same, the book as a whole is a 
_ complete revelation of Whistler the artist, serious 
and sincere, a characteristic chronicle of Whistler 


_. the man, witty, whimsical, “wicked.” The Butter- 
fly, bowing in mock deference to “‘Messieurs les En- 


nemis” on the opening page gives the keynote to 
this “wickedness.” After reading the various epi- 


' ay sodes you cannot wonder at the fear in which he 
was held. He was unfailing in his detection of the 


_enemy’s weak point, unerring in his aim of 
the little barbed arrows. Take the page where he 


quotes Hamerton’s confession of laughter, with 
the crowd, in front of The White Girl when it 


_ hung in the Salon of the Refused. Whistler adds 
nothing of his own but on the margin, side by side 
with the confession, simply prints Hamerton’s 


opinion of Corot’s paintings as the sketches of an 


amateur, his assertion that whatever Courbet 


touched he made unpleasant, his scorn of Daubigny | 
_ who is without either drawing or color; and then 


_ his praise of Gustave Doré as “the most imagina- 


finished Hamerton as a critic. In that catalogue of 


his etchings in which Whistler quotes, after each 


cant in their time, are in ours ioe and not _ 
* worth resurrecting. Or the events that caused the 
correspondence have long ceased to be of conse- 


aed 


_ tive, the profoundest, the most productive poet — 
that has ever sprung from the French race”—this 


Ras cenit ann ibhtnnlst chiens 0 


THE SMITH PASSAGE DU DRAGON 


viously found “‘so little” in the prints; on the mar- 
gin is Hamerton’s dictum that “the Thames is 
beautiful from Maidenhead to Kent, but not from 
Battersea to Sheerness” which were the reaches 
Whistler made immortal in his Thames etchings. 
Wedmore is quoted: “He—Whistler—took from 
London to Venice his happy fashion of suggesting 
lapping water.”’ Whistler’s “Reflection” on the mar- 
gin: “Like Eno’s fruit salt or the Axti-mal-de- 
mer!” And so Whistler kept it up all through, to 
the end of the catalogue and the last words on the 
last page: ““We roar all like bears,” the Butterfly 
kicking joyously. 

There was wit of another kind when he wrote 
that the visit planned to his own country, estab- 
lished as an impossibility, had of course become 
true, “for one cannot continually disappoint a 
Continent!” Or his description of Mortimer 
Menpes, who had been adapting one of his schemes 
of decoration: ‘“‘an Australian immigrant who, like 
the kangaroo of his country, is born with a pocket 
and puts everything into it,” followed by the 
wired advice: “You will blow your brains out, of 
course. Pigott has shown you what to do under the 
_ circumstances, and you know your way to Spain. 
 Good-by!” It is scarcely necessary to add that this 
was at the time of the scandal of the Parnell letters 


he tie Pthe: dig at 7 ae who had pre- 


. yet, O Atlas,” he explained in The World, ehey ) q 


; say that I cannot keep a friend—my dear, I cannot a 


afford it—and you only keep for me their scalps.” 


" His advice to the lady who complained of the 


| ‘ trouble her friends gave her was: “Do as I do, 


| Madame, lose them.” > 


__ To go on quoting would be but to statis The 
hs: Gentle Art over again. His talk was as full of the 


same delightful touches. He never could say any- 
thin g like anybody else. I recall his description of 


Hy, os - Rome, where he went for the first time in 1899 
to be “best man” at Heinemann’s wedding at 


_ Porto d’Anzio close by: “‘a bit of an old ruin along- 
side of a railway station, where I saw Mrs. Potter 
- Palmer!” And his remark when Henley criticized 
his design of a gallows for the cover of one of 
_ Heinemann’s books as too slight, in need of a sup- 
port. “Well, you know, that’s the usual sort of 
gallows, but this one will do. It will hang all of us. 
Just like Henley’s selfishness to want a strong one.” 


At a dinner, when religion was the subject, and 


~ some one asked him “‘And what are you, Mr. Whis- 


 tler?” “I, madam? Why, I am an amateur.” And 


his retort to the Englishman who thought “the 
trouble is, we English are too honest, we have al- 


ways been stupidly honest.” “You see,” said Whis- — 
tier, “whenever there has been honesty in this 


at a a Oe 


from whom he had suffered dg remained al- 
ways a fruitful subject of jest. The popular Bath 
Club in London he called ‘the latest incarnation 
of the British discovery of water.” Back from a 
journey on a P. and O. boat, he described how at 
dinner all the men and all the stewards were in 
dinner jackets, all the women in low gowns, no 
matter how sea-sick, “Well, you know,” he said to 
me, “you might as well dress to ride in an omnibus.” 
In a speech at a dinner in Paris, he pointed out the 
difference of method in English and French Art 
Schools: “Now, as to teaching, in England it is all 
a matter of taste, but in France at least they tell 
you which end of the brush to stick in your 
mouth.” Naturally, Whistler was not always wel- 
come at an English dinner party. He said to me 
once: “Well, you know, when I’m asked out to 
dinner, I always enjoy myself. But—well—I’m 
never asked to the same house twice.” 

He could frighten away the most ardent col- 
lector of his work. An American, who had managed 
to force himself into the Studio, asked him: 

“How much for the whole lot, Mr. Whistler?” 

“Five millions.” — 

“What?” 

“My posthumous prices.” 

o But the stories are endless. A favorite, often 
published, is of Whistler buying a hat in a hat 


are an irate customer | : 
_ him for a salesman, shouting to shies 1. say hh 
hat doesn’t fit,” and Whistler, looking him up and 5 
_ down: “Your coat don’t either.” Another, often 
_ repeated, is of the sitter who was not satisfied with 
his portrait, ‘‘Do you call it a good piece of art?” 
he asked. “Well, do you call yourself a good piece 
: ¢ of Nature?” asked Whistler. 
In one respect Whistler’s wit must seem out of 
_ fashion to the new generation, for he was ever 
_ reticent on subjects nowadays considered essentially 
“good form” in the schoolroom as in the parlor. 
_ It has been recorded of his talk that it was excep- 
tionally “clean.” He had no use for what were of 
old “‘smoking-room stories.” This was my experi- 
ence and it was Joseph Pennell’s as well. Once only 
_ did I know him to venture on what to him was 
unsavory ground. We were talking of a country 
house scandal going the rounds in London. ‘Well, 
~ you know,” was Whistler’s conclusion, ‘for week- 
ends the rule should be to ring a loud bell at five 
in the morning, after which guests are expected 
to be found in no rooms save their own.” From 
ae Whistler this was extreme, mild as it must seem to 
our young people brought up on to-day’s best 
sellers and raided dramas. I would not give the — 
a impression that there was the slightest touch of the 
prude about him. He was too wise, too what Hen- _ 
ley would have called “human.” Prudishness in- 


per Pra nm ed 2 


Shee waren, 


Teh madhie ity sae ie tin arene 
tee Map ees ta 


Ore 


os 


[AIC 
eee a 


"Ss, SOHO 


ST. ANNE S, S 


a ¢ hice: Congress eae Whistler’s British Are 
ists’ ‘episode, had been talking rubbish about the 
“degradations” of the model’s “shameful calling” 
and so on. Whistler sent a nude to the next British 
Artists’ Exhibition. Underneath it he wrote: 
Horsley soit qui mal y pense,” and Horsley never 
outlived it. 

It is difficult to give a just idea of Whistler’s 
wit because his manner, his personality was such 
a part of it. His own enjoyment was so keen it be- 
came contagious. He was sometimes surprised him- 
self that his inspiration should be so sudden and 
so sure. “Providence,” he would say, “is kind and 
sends me these little things.” And he was by no 
“means the last to appreciate his good things. 
Drouet, the sculptor and old student friend, told 
us of a winter evening in Paris towards the end 
~ when Whistler, old and ill, tired and fearfully de- 
pressed, was going out to dinner much against his 
inclination. It was in the days of the old-fashioned 
horse cab when the same fare was paid for every 
ride, whatever the distance, and Whistler was go- 
ing far. It was bitter cold and he took a cab with 
7 _ the chauffrette sign. Presently he found there was 
no chauffrette inside and he saw it outside under 
“the cocher’s feet. He got to the end of his drive, 
frozen, miserable, ill-tempered. He paid the exact 
Bface. The cocher raged: “And where is the pour- 


had not known him so gay for years. ada 
A deaf man, watching him, could not have 
helped enjoying his stories and his Wwitticisms. His 
whole face lit up, his deep-set eyes under their 
heavy. eyebrows glittered and flamed and laughed, 
his hands seemed to talk, his eloquent hands, slim, | 
long, flexible. Boldini, in his portrait, caught their 
character. “His exquisite hands, never at rest," 
Arthur Symons describes them. As I write, I am 
more and more conscious of the impossibility of 
giving Whistler’s wit its full value unless an ade- 
quate impression of his personality can be conveyed — 
with it. In memory, I cannot separate his person-_ 
ality from the thing said. I see him always in our 
Buckingham Street dining-room, where such long 
hours were spent, such long discussions held, so 
many stories told over our dinner table, he always 
in his special place, which was in front of the fire | 
because he never could be warm enough. I see his 
deep blue eyes flaring and dancing under the un- 
forgettable eyebrows, his hands, in their rapid, 
ceaseless movement, punctuating, underlining, em- 
phasizing his every word, his lips drawn up with - 
that “wicked,” quizzical expression which was 
half laugh, half joy in one of the little things | 
Providence never failed to send him; the mobile, © 


his sy 
5 rhen Whistler “felt like a little devil,”—“Really, 
1s do believe I am a devil like Barnaby Rudge’s 
raven”—Boldini’s portrait comes nearer showing 
him in that mood, arrayed in his armor against 
_Messieurs les Ennemis, than any other I know. So 
long as Whistler’s talk and writings survive in 
published records, his reputation for wit cannot 
‘be denied him. But the charm and the gayety he 
brought to that wit have gone with the man. 
Those who knew him are fast dwindling in num- 
bers and the world, presently, must believe in the 
- power of his personality as best it can from the 
_ testimony bequeathed to it by the few who loved 
and the many who feared him. 


he ORS rm RM aig per 


VIII 


WHISTLER THE MAN AND THE ARTIST: 5 
HIS TRIUMPH 


HISTLER won the battle, the tide eo 
in his favor, while he had still a few yeas 
in which to enjoy the victory. 

Several things had happened to bring this sbocd 
His Presidency of the British Artists, though it 
ended in the usual public howls of foolish laugh- 
ter, was not without its effect. It implied official 

recognition. The fact that some members of the 
Society resigned with him was more important, 
for it was a public acknowledgment that artists 
were not all against him. Younger men were break- 
ing loose from the conventions of the old school 
and they hailed him as the Master and proclaimed 
themselves the “Followers.” The new generation 
meant a new opposition, a new secession. Op- | 
positions, like other matters, are apt to be ordered 
with less outward enthusiasm in England than 
elsewhere, but by the beginning of the Nineties | 
the power of the old Academic set was waning | 
though the signs were as yet scarcely visible. The 


keener of vision detected one sign in the New 
184 ay 


THE CONVALESCENT 


Be attracting most af he younger men of promise. 
To see now the work they were exhibiting then is 


—_— 


to marvel at the restraint of their revolution. At 

the time, however, according to Academic stand- 

ards, it was anything but restrained; to the average 

man who, in those days, figured as “the man in 

the street,” it was somewhat incomprehensible, to 

artists a fine assertion of independence. I recall a 

Private View, where I met Félix Buhot, and the 

gleam in his rather wild eyes as we made the rounds 

together. “I smell the powder,” he said. Buhot was 

always extravagant, fantastic in his personality as 

in the strange little afterthoughts overflowing on 

the margin of his prints. There was powder, but” 
only for the most sensitive nostrils. What Whistler 
had to do with it all was evident on every side, 
for in the work of this young group he was the pre- 
vailing influence, the master to be studied, whose 
tradition was to be carried on. 

Another factor in his favor was the appearance 
of a new group of critics, the development of a 
new school of criticism. The Hamertons and the 
Wedmores no longer had it entirely their own way, 
no longer were alone in possession. Any one with 
as keen a scent as Buhot began to smell the powder 
in the critical columns of the more enterprising 
papers. Towards the end of the Eighties The Star 


was founded in London, a half-penny afternoon 


with a more brilliant ait had many oF the ‘old a 


| _ well-established sheets could boast. A. B. Walkley 


wrote the dramatic column, Le Gallienne the liter- 


a _ ary column, George Bernard Shaw the art column 


which he promptly relinquished for the music 
column and, at his suggestion, art was handed , 
over to the care of Joseph Pennell. I had not yet — 


met Whistler, Joseph Pennell knew him only — 


slightly, but he did know Whistler’s work well — 
and, young as he was, had recognized its greatness _ 


and distinction before he left America. What 


Joseph Pennell thought with conviction, he had a 
way all his life of saying and writing with em-_ 
phasis, a fact which his present reputation has — 
established beyond a doubt. Whistler triumphed 
as master in The Star as on the walls of the New 
English Art Club, R.O.M.—‘Bob”—Stevenson was 
The Pall Mall’s art critic, and training in Paris and 
Barbizon had long since freed him from Academic 
prejudice. There was also D. S. MacColl, just up 
from Oxford, writing for The Spectator, and there 
was Charles Whibley, Henley’s art “young man” 


on The Scots Observer. Here were four writers 
__ with a talent for forcible writing and young enough 


not to have lost their enthusiasm. Thus, at last, 


« - Whistler had Hollen eo and critics to uphold 


him. 
He had waited long rae success, but whe it ie 


came it was without stint. In 1891 the Glasgow 
Corporation bought his Carlyle painted almost 
twenty years before. The bargain was not with- 
out haggling. Whistler’s price was one thousand 
guineas, The deputation from Glasgow, being 
Scotch, protested against such a price and asked 
him to think it over. The next day, returning to 
his studio, they said: “Well, Mr. Whistler, have 
you thought it over?” And Whistler said, “Why, 
gentlemen,—well, you know, how could I think 
of anything but the pleasure of seeing you again?” 
And, telling the story, he added: “And, naturally, 
being gentlemen, they understood, and they gave 
me a check for the thousand guineas.” 

The same year, 1891, the Mother was bought 
for the Luxembourg. There was no haggling over 
the price. The payment, when the French Govern- 
ment invests in works of art, is in the honor done 
to the artist, and the Luxembourg, meaning every- 
thing to Whistler as the first step to the Louvre, 
he was content with the nominal sum of four thou- 
sand francs. His chief satisfaction was in the choice 
of the Mother for ‘so solemn a consecration.” It 
should not be forgotten that the picture was 
bought on the initiative of M. Clemenceau. When 
exhibited in Philadelphia and New York, in 
1881-82, it could have been bought for one thou- 
sand dollars, and not a gallery, not a collector 
_ would face so risky an investment. The whirligig 


~ Louvre where it was Whistler’s pee ambition 
to see it. 


Mr. David Croal Thomson, then managing the q 


Goupil Gallery in London, was the first to realize 


practically how complete had been the change in 


the attitude towards Whistler, the first with the 


courage to seize the critical moment in the turning 
of the tide and to propose a retrospective exhibi- 
tion. He would have restricted it to the portraits. 


But Whistler was always wise, though few might 
credit him with wisdom. He decided for all his 
paintings. By their variety would he challenge “the 
enemies” for years warring against him, bent upon 
his destruction. No half-measures were to weaken 
his “heroic kick in Bond Street,” as he called the 
Exhibition. He was right. The variety stupefied 
the old critics who had never believed, it took 
away the breath of the young critics who over- 
flowed with faith but who had never seen the 
earlier pictures. Every stage in his development 
was represented. Here were the paintings done 


under Courbet’s influence, the Japanese pictures, 
Pp Pp 


the noble succession of full-length portraits and 
the Nocturnes. The Press View is fresh in my 
memory, for I was there as, by this time, I was 


writing art criticism, beginning to play understudy — 
to Joseph Pennell in his London papers and taking — 


Hey: of time lias ‘not Seu 6 in bates about its 
revenge, and the portrait to-day hangs in the 


* gts 
ort ae 


Stillman’s place on the New York Nation. The 

excitement was tense, the younger group exulting 
in this justification of their faith, the older group 
a trifle subdued and bewildered anew. The success 
of the Exhibition with the Press was overwhelming 
and Whistler was receiving reports of his triumph 
in one of the inner sanctuaries of the Gallery. 

The result was inevitable. Day after day the 
Gallery was crowded. Whistlers began to change 
hands and to sell for large sums. People did not 
have to be asked to sit for their portraits. They 
clamored for the privilege. Rich Americans be- 
 sieged him, eager “‘to pour California into his lap.” 
He did not object, his pockets, he thought, should 
always be full if his golden eggs were not to be 
addled. An amazing future opened out before him, 
a future of ease in which he could do the work that 
waited to be done, free from the old anxiety and 
continual strain. His worst enemy could not 
grudge him this one unclouded interval, it was so 
miserably short. The first shadow, light perhaps 
but deeply resented, was the traffic in his pictures, 
not by strangers but by friends and relations to 
whom he had presented them or sold them for a 
song during his numerous financial crises. Where 
he had received pounds, they were getting their 
thousands. It was what always happens under the 
circumstances but that did not make it easier to 
_ bear, and he raged against the “‘so-called friends” 


« 


who were “turning his repu to poun 
_ shillings and pence, traveling over Europe and 
___ holiday-making on the profits.” ait Oa 
The other shadow was heavier and its darkness 
_ never altogether lifted. The Goupil Exhibition had 
exalted him to a pedestal high enough to satisfy 
the most ambitious. He was living again in the 
Paris he loved, with a beautiful apartment on the 
_ Rue du Bac and a big studio on the Rue Notre-_ 
-Dame-des-Champs, His countrymen were giving 
_ up their long policy of distrust and neglect and 
flocking to his studio. He was asked to join with 
Puvis de Chavannes, Sargent and Abbey in decorat- 
ing the Boston Library. Years of fine work and 
_ the comfort of prosperity seemed ahead of him 
_ when the crushing blow fell, the one blow in his 
life against which he could not react. He had mar- 
ried in 1888 the widow of W. E. Godwin, architect 
of the White House. ‘ ‘The fascinating Widdie’ 
_ and I are now the Whistlers,” he wrote to Waldo : 
Story at the time, “people who really were meant 
for each other from the beginning.” And the 
heroic kick in Bond Street had scarcely cleared the 
way for further triumphs when his wife fell ill. 
_ Month by month, week by week, day by day, it 
was his fate to watch her fading away in the agony 
of cancer before, in 1896, death came to release 
her and to leave him again alone, broken in health — ‘f 
and spirit. ae 


THE BEACH 


This was the period when I saw him often and 
intimately. ‘In sorrow, as in happiness, he could 
‘not bear to stay by himself. But there was a dif- 
ference. In sorrow the only people whose company 
he could endure were friends upon whose sym- 
_ pathy and understanding he could count. When 
_ he was in London and we were at home, he would 
come to us to dine sometimes three or four eve- 
_ nings a week. For months he would share William 
Heinemann’s flat. Not that he was without places 
_ of his own. For a time he had his apartment, his 
studio and a room in the Hotel Chatham in Paris 
and in London a studio and a room in Garlant’s 
Hotel—no wonder he would jest over his ‘‘collec- 
tion of chateaux and pieds-a-terre,” though the ex- 
pense frightened him. He was not used to having 
money. Once, during those last years, he asked 
Heinemann to go to his Bank and find out if any- 
thing was left in his account, and Heinemann 
found a nice little balance of over six thousand 
pounds. Heinemann’s friendship was a stimulus 
and a support and his flat in Whitehall Court was 
conveniently close to Buckingham Street. In the 
intimacy that from now on strengthened, we be- 
came more conscious than ever of the two sides 

to Whistler that seemed a contradiction and made 
him incomprehensible to the crowd. No evenings 
in my life have been gayer than those he spent 
with us. He might arrive sad and weary but, 


a seadally with tha? rest eee oe ea talk and 
good dinner—for he approved of the dinners ¢ o 
' French Augustine cooked for him—he relaxed, 
forgot for the time. He lived over the past, told 
us the old stories, recalled the old duels with “the 
enemies”—told and recalled them as no one else. | 
could or can. This does not mean that he was in- : 
different to the present. He kept up with the 
times, was aware of everything going on, whechesm . 
the last defeat in South Africa or the last scandal — 
in the studios. He loved gossip, would be quite — 
indignant if I had gathered none in my rounds of — 


the galleries or the course of my visits. He was sure — 
I had a cupboard full of skeletons and, careful as 
I was, one day they would all come rattling down 
about my ears. 

_ He was as rigid in his opinions as ever, would’ : 
not yield an inch if art as the “science of beauty” — 
was questioned or his theories disputed. Over the 
dinner table he and Joseph Pennell would fight 
evening after evening until I would say to myself, 
this surely is the end. One excited evening, with © 
the bang of Whistler’s knife on the table a picture — : 
tumbled down from the wall, the glass shattered - 
in a hundred pieces. I waited, trembling. But Whis- ; 
tler was enchanted—even the pictures argued for j 
him. The popular idea was that he could not stand — 
contradiction, “I am not arguing with you—I am — 


telling you,” was one of his favorite sayings an 


Oe eT een 


Parte) 


aT 


FE 
1 


TR 


Le Bt MM ces SO aaa had a (8 
4 wee Pe eal nS ae 
EADY ah Wa ve S 4 xm Fei if & Sore wea . 


197 


4 was the end of his friendship. Bie our experience 

was that talk without contradiction would have 

Peeemed as flat to him as dinner without wine. 

_ Joseph Pennell was no more a man of peace than 

Whistler, nothing could keep him from speaking 
the truth that was in him. They often disagreed, 
but were only the friendlier, only appreciated each 

_ other the more for their tournament of talk. It was 
the toady who offended beyond forgiveness. 

As time went on Whistler was glad enough to 
meet people—congenial people—in our place, and 
all who met him there succumbed to the spell of 
his gayety and charm. From this gayety the bitter- 
ness had all but vanished, for “the enemies” had all 
but disappeared. Only once was I present when the 
old anger flared up and the old enemy withered 
before it. Joseph Pennell was lecturing on Lithog- 
raphy at the Society of Arts, and Whistler went to 
the lecture with me. At the end, as we got up to 
go and were starting to leave the lecture hall, a 
hand was stretched out from the row behind us 
and a voice said, ““Come now, Mr. Whistler, be a 
gentleman and shake hands with me.” Whistler 
drew himself up, the danger signals in his eyes: 

“Tt is because I am a gentleman that I refuse to 
_ shake hands with you,” and he walked on, I trem- 
_ bling at his heels. Something of the same kind hap- 
pened one afternoon when Joseph Pennell was 


walking with him somewhere near Charing-Cr : 
They met a well-known architect who ran to him” 
with hand outstretched, Bisa Jimmie, I have 
not seen you for years.” Whistler put up his 


monocle and stared at the architect. “Joseph,” he 


said, ‘‘who is this person?” Those who had turned — 
their backs upon him or who, he thought, had 
wronged him, in the years of persecution, he would — 


not take into his arms because they changed their 


tactics with his changing fortunes. 


= 
‘x 


Whistler’s gayety never let me lose sight of his | 
seriousness. Art was the supreme interest. People, 
gossip, argument could not hold him when art 
beckoned. Sometimes I feared that his absorption — 


in it during the day would hasten the end. He was - 


in a fever of work, full of schemes and commis- 
. * ° 2 d 
sions. There was so much still to be done, so little 
time to do it in, he often said, he was just begin- 


ning to learn and, with knowledge, what could he 


- 


not accomplish. He was painting the series of por- 
traits of children, he was busy with his last large - 
full-lengths, some of which were never finished, 


some worked over to their ruin. He was doing his 
little pastels of draped figures. His water-color box | 
went with him in his wanderings through the — 
streets. The little case of transfer paper was almost — 
always in his pocket. During the summer, on the 
northern coast of France, or near Dublin, or among © 


the dunes of Holland, he was panei. skeechinddy r 


3 


‘- 


SER te oy Mee ely SMe eee een Ane DR OY 
RRR eek, eee ert Dy aka, 
nen ee oe ay aor i ae or, ee 


hh, WHISTLER | PAL Oey gg hae 


working incessantly. He never stopped except for 

_ the days he spent, reluctantly, in bed, except for 

L the evening after the light had faded, though even 

j then it was not easy to drag him from his easel. 
To the end, if the two clashed, the seriousness of 
the artist overpowered the gayety of the man. 

The days in bed grew more frequent. Sorrow 
had left its mark. Hard work began to tell. The 
very last years were sadness itself. A subdued Whis- 
tler with only occasional flashes of the old gayety, 
a Whistler preoccupied with his health, a Whistler 
breaking his heart over the loss of time—this was 

not a Whistler his friends found pleasure in seeing. 
Sometimes I was tempted to wish that the end had 
come during the summer of 1902 when he was 
desperately ill in The Hague. His life was despaired 
of. But he recovered and, with his recovery, the 
old wit seemed to revive. Bulletins of his condition, 
some most alarming, had been sent daily to the 
London papers and when, at last, news followed of 
his convalescence, The Morning Post published an 
article that obviously had been prepared for an 
obituary. With something of the old joy that filled 
the letters to Atlas, he wrote to The Morning Post 
to beg that the ‘“‘ready wreath and quick biography 
might be put back into their pigeonhole for later 
use” and, reference having been made to his still 
 luxuriantly thick hair, he added an apology for 
“continuing to wear my own hair and eyebrows 


aes 
Hy 
Sos 


after dneneunne! coun oa eminent perso 


have long ceased the habit.” 

A melancholy Whistler he was when he got back’ 
to London, the ghost of the Whistler who had 
laughed his troubles away and scattered his enemies” 
with the first dart of the Butterfly’s sting. A 
Whistler with shrunken face and with eyes that, 
through the long last winter, were ready to shut 
in sleep after a few minutes’ talk—a Whistler dis- 
daining a dressing gown, symbol of illness, and 
tottering about the studio in the familiar long 
brown overcoat reaching to his heels—anything 
but the “dandy” Whistler he had always rejoiced 
in being since the West Point days when he liked — 
to remember himself as ‘‘very dandy in gray.” 
Now and then in London, as in The Hague, he 
rallied. When Canfield, the gambler, whose por- 
trait he was painting, bought the Rosa Corder 
from Graham Robertson, it was in his studio again, - 
and a wire bade us come “to make your adieux to : 
her before her departure for America,” and I began - 


— 


tl chia te 


to hope as I stood by him while he wiped the can-— 


vas here and there with a soft silk handkerchief 
and asked me if she was not beautiful. It was one 
of the rare good days. He was triumphant when, © 
another day, he showed his Daughter of Eve, won- 
derful then but spoiled by him later, to Joseph 
Pennell and said he had painted it that very morn- 


ing in a couple of hours. A few letters were written 
y ca w & 14 
2 “y oe 


oe 


i. 


~ i 


LOL: a International Seer, He contributed to 
j an exhibition of old silver at the Fine Art Society’s. 
_ He had surprising moments, but they were only 
moments, One knew all the time the end was in- 
evitable and there was no surprise when it came 
suddenly on Friday, July 17, 1903. 

The funeral service was at old Chelsea Church 
on Cheyne Walk, to which on many Sunday morn- 
ings he had walked with his mother, leaving her 
at the door. He was buried in old Chiswick Grave- 
yard at his wife’s side. Westminster or St. Paul’s 
crypt would seem a more fitting place for the 
most distinguished artist who worked in England 
during the Nineteenth Century. But at Chiswick 
Whistler lies not far from Hogarth, whose art he 
loved as a boy in St. Petersburg, and up to whom 
he looked with reverence all his life as England’s 
greatest master. And so, these two great men sleep 
in this remote suburban graveyard, as William 
Penn sleeps in lonely Jordan’s, and the simplicity 
of their last home is as it should be, for their monu- 
ment is in their art, and as artists they will live 
_ forever. 


The publishers wish to express their appreciation 
to Mr. Elmer Adler, The Boston Museum, The Car- 
negie Institute, The Freer Collection, Frederick 
Keppel & Co., The Kraushaar Galleries, The Metro- 
politan Museum, The National Gallery in London, 
and the New York Public Library, for their co- 
operation in making the publication of this volume 
possible. 


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